Led end-to-end product strategy and UX for a mobile-first platform that transformed how professional football clubs evaluate players, moving from fragmented tools to a unified system that improved decision-making velocity and consistency across scouting operations.
Professional football scouts often work in fast-moving, high-pressure environments, but many were still relying on fragmented tools and inconsistent reporting methods. Notes were spread across Whatsapp & Slack messages, spreadsheets, and handwritten documents, making it difficult to compare players consistently or quickly share insights with recruitment teams.
Key Insight
"Scouts needed a tool that supported quick, confident decision-making during live matches — not a system that added friction or pulled attention away from the game."
One of the biggest challenges was deciding what not to build.
There were plenty of ideas early on — video analysis, deeper player comparisons, predictive scoring — but with a small engineering team and tight timelines, the priority was creating something scouts would actually adopt in their day-to-day workflow as quickly as possible.
From research, it became clear that speed and usability during live matches mattered more than feature depth. Scouts needed to quickly capture observations, structure reports consistently, and avoid duplicating work across multiple tools.
We deliberately avoided overcomplicating the first release. Features like video annotation, advanced analytics, and third-party data integrations were valuable, but they introduced significant complexity without solving the core adoption problem.
A key product decision was avoiding rigid evaluation templates. Different scouts naturally assessed players in different ways, so instead of forcing a single methodology, I pushed for a more flexible structure that still allowed reports to remain comparable across the organisation.
Rather than trying to build the complete long-term vision immediately, the focus was on shipping a product that felt useful, lightweight, and reliable enough to become part of a scout’s real matchday workflow.
Rather than trying to build a feature-heavy scouting platform from day one, the focus was on simplifying the parts of the workflow scouts used most often. A lot of the design work came down to reducing friction — helping users capture information quickly, structure reports consistently, and stay focused during live matches.
One challenge was designing a reporting structure that felt consistent across the organisation without becoming too restrictive for individual scouts.
Different scouts naturally had different ways of assessing players, so instead of forcing a rigid scoring system, I designed a more flexible evaluation framework that still made reports easier to compare across teams.
Impact: Created a more consistent reporting structure while still allowing scouts to work in a way that felt natural to them.
During the project, I started incorporating AI tools into parts of the design workflow to speed up early exploration and communication with developers.
I used AI-assisted prototyping to quickly test ideas, generate rough interaction concepts, and create starting points for technical discussions before refining everything properly in Figma. It helped reduce time spent on repetitive setup work and made early collaboration with engineering more efficient.
Impact: Faster iteration cycles and clearer conversations between design and development during early-stage feature exploration.
Early on, it became clear that some assumptions around grading and reporting would only really be validated once scouts started using the product regularly.
Because of that, I designed the grading structure to be relatively easy to adjust post-launch rather than treating the first version as something fixed and final.
Impact: Allowed the product to evolve more naturally based on real usage and feedback after launch.
With a small team and limited engineering capacity, prioritisation became a major part of the process.
There were plenty of ideas we could have added, but I worked closely with stakeholders and developers to stay focused on the core workflow problems that would have the biggest impact for launch. In practice, this often meant pushing back on features that added complexity without solving an immediate user need.
Impact: Delivered a focused MVP that solved core workflow problems without delaying launch through unnecessary feature expansion.
Rather than waiting for polished designs, I tested rough concepts and interaction ideas with scouts throughout development to validate whether workflows felt intuitive in real-world usage.
This helped identify usability issues early and gave the team more confidence in design decisions before committing engineering effort.
Impact: Reduced uncertainty during development and improved confidence in the core interaction patterns before launch.
Design Principle
Every design decision came back to one question: would this make scouting workflows quicker, clearer, and easier to use in real match situations?
The first version of the platform successfully brought together parts of the scouting workflow that had previously been spread across multiple tools and formats. Rather than trying to solve everything at once, the focus was on creating a lightweight, usable system that scouts could realistically adopt within their day-to-day work
The launch established a clearer and more consistent approach to player reporting while also giving the team a much stronger understanding of how scouts actually wanted to use the platform in practice.
Delivered a usable first version centred around core scouting workflows rather than unnecessary feature depth.
Helped consolidate notes, evaluations, and reporting into a more structured and consistent experience.
Created a shared reporting structure that made player evaluations easier to compare across scouts and teams.
Designed workflows and systems flexible enough to support future additions like video analysis and deeper player insights.
Real usage and feedback helped shape a much clearer understanding of which features and workflows were genuinely valuable to scouts.
This project pushed me beyond just designing screens and into much more product-focused thinking. Because the team was small and timelines were tight, a lot of the work involved making practical decisions around scope, prioritisation, and balancing long-term ideas against what was realistically achievable for an MVP.
This project pushed me beyond pure UX execution and into much more product-focused decision making. Because the product direction was still evolving, a big part of the role involved helping shape priorities, defining what the MVP should realistically include, and creating clarity across stakeholders with different expectations.
Limited engineering capacity and tight timelines forced the team to stay focused on the workflows that mattered most. In practice, this meant saying no to features that sounded exciting but didn’t meaningfully improve the core scouting experience. Looking back, keeping the scope tighter helped create a more usable and coherent first release.
One of the biggest learnings was recognising that many important design decisions weren’t really visual decisions at all. They were trade-offs between usability, technical feasibility, adoption, and delivery timelines. Working closely with engineering throughout the project helped me think much more holistically about how product decisions affect implementation, maintenance, and long-term scalability.
The project also reinforced how important communication and alignment are within smaller product teams. Regular conversations with scouts, developers, and leadership helped keep the product grounded in real workflows while ensuring the team stayed aligned on what problems we were actually trying to solve.
A lot of the testing focused on the scouts creating reports, which made sense given they were the primary users. Looking back, involving recruitment staff and decision-makers earlier could have provided additional perspective on how reports were consumed downstream and may have influenced some prioritisation decisions differently.
One challenge in a fast-moving MVP environment is that deprioritised features can sometimes feel like permanent rejections to stakeholders. In hindsight, being more explicit about what was deferred versus what was intentionally planned for later phases would probably have helped reduce some friction around scope decisions.
Early on, it was tempting to think about advanced features like video analysis or deeper player data integrations. But the reality was that the biggest problem wasn’t lack of functionality — it was workflow friction. Looking back, keeping the first version lightweight and usable was probably the right decision because adoption would have been much harder if the product felt too complex too early.
Detailed wireframes, prototypes, and final UI designs available under NDA upon request
Due to client confidentiality, specific features, data models, and visual designs have been generalised in this portfolio version