PRODUCT MANAGEMENT & STRATEGY WORKFrom Text Feed to Match Theater
We set out to turn a static play by play into a living match companion that feels as exciting as a console game and as informative as a professional broadcast.
Role
VP Product Management
(Lead Product Strategist)
Industry
Sports Media
Duration
3 Months
Services
Product strategy, competitive research, data design, motion direction, mobile experience
Deliverables / Platform
Prototype for User Research Sessions
The Challenge
Following the acquisition of UEFA Champions League live rights, CBS Sports needed a soccer experience that stood apart. The market leaders we audited — FotMob, Premier League, ESPN, and NBC Sports — largely presented soccer through text heavy play by play lists. These feeds are useful, but they rarely feel alive. They deliver moments as sentences rather than as events you can feel.
Our question
“What would it look like if a game tracker felt like a console broadcast in your hand”
The Insight
Soccer has long stretches that are quiet followed by bursts of drama. The product problem is not only data density, it is emotional pacing. Fans do not want to read a wall of text to find the moment that matters. They want a sense of place, rhythm, anticipation, and payoff. The solution is not more sentences. It is better visual language and better motion.
Our Approach
1) Audit the landscape
Benchmarked information architecture, event vocabularies, and visual treatments across leading apps. Most experiences centered on stacked sentences with small icons. Few leaned into motion or spatial understanding. Fewer still offered a clean way to preview momentum or see tactics at a glance.
2) Map the data to a story
Decomposed the play by play feed into normalized event groups and transformed those groups into reusable data cards. Each card becomes a small visual narrative unit with a consistent layout, color, and motion signature. Examples include:
Shot map card
Chance quality card with xG band
Pressing heat card
Momentum wave card
Set piece card for corners and free kicks
Passing network card
Keeper save card
VAR review card
Goal build up card with the last three passes
3) Treat the tracker as a stage
Defined a canvas that prioritizes the pitch, then layers cards and controls around it. Cards appear and resolve with purposeful motion, so a user who glances at the screen can understand the state of play in a second. Motion is not decoration. Motion is meaning.
4) Borrow energy from console visuals
We referenced the way EA Sports FIFA communicates drama with camera angles, glows, and quick flare moments. We distilled that language into short mobile safe animations that never block interaction and never slow the score update loop.
5) Design for different attention modes
Lean back mode delivers a continuous theatre view with automatic card highlights as moments occur
Lean forward mode gives a strip of filters and lets users jump to the card type they care about, like shot map or momentum
Catch up mode presents a quick recap when a user opens mid match, then drops them into live
6) Personalize the surface
Favorites and bets drive context. If a user follows a club or has a parlay with a goal scorer, we foreground that player and those events in the card order and in the push rhythm.
The Solution
A mobile first game tracker that feels like a match studio
Top layer
Live score, clock, match time segment, and realtime game highlights
Pill controls to switch between theatre, stats, lineup, and commentary views
Cards as a visual grammar
Cards use a shared grid, color system, and motion scale leveraging each team’s primary and secondary colors
Each card fades to a compact chip after a few seconds so the theatre never feels busy
Deep dive shelves
Swipe up reveals shelves for shot map, passing networks, heat maps, and set piece history
Dive into player stats when substitutions occur
Shelves are scrollable galleries of the same cards so learning the grammar once pays off everywhere
Broadcast and rights
When a match is available live, the theatre view gives a clear jump into video with a soft handoff
When live rights are not available, we still deliver broadcast grade context through the card
Design principles
Emotion follows information
Every animation must clarify the state of play, not distract from it.One tap to meaning
A user should understand what just happened in a single glance.Memory matters
Cards preserve a timeline of important events so a user can catch up quickly.Speed is a feature
All cards must render from feed data in a fraction of a second. If it is slow, it does not ship.
Competitive advantage
From text to theater | Competitors present lines. We present moments.
Data becomes a visual language | Cards standardize complex concepts like chance quality or pressing into simple shapes and short motion.
Better on mobile | The design is built for phone posture and quick looks, not resized desktop widgets.
Made for rights moments | When we have live video, the tracker amplifies it. When we do not, the tracker still feels premium.
Technical approach
Event normalization | Map vendor feeds into a clean event schema with clear priorities and fallbacks.
Card factory | A rendering service chooses the appropriate card template and animates it using a small motion library.
State manager | Maintain a local state for current pitch focus, last event time, and active shelves to avoid jarring jumps.
Performance budget | Strict caps on image weight and animation length. Favor vector and shader effects over heavy bitmaps.
Accessibility | High contrast mode, no motion mode, and full screen reader labels for each event.
Success measures
Attention | Time per match view and card interactions per session
Comprehension | Card dismiss time, replay taps, and reduced bounce after major events
Habit | Push open rate during match windows and return rate across a week of fixtures
Business | Lift in video starts when rights are available and lift in high value ad formats inside the tracker
Why this matters for CBS Sports
Soccer is global and emotional. A better game tracker is not a side project. It is the front door to many hours of fandom. By turning events into a visual language and by treating the tracker as a stage, we give fans something that feels worthy of Champions League on a phone. We also create a flexible system that scales to other sports where rhythm and momentum matter just as much.
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