Fanatics Markets
(0→1 · Strategy · Emerging Markets · Contracts Trading)
My Role
ROLE
Staff Product Designer
SCOPE
Catalog & Discovery
TEAM
Design Lead · 2–4 Product Designers · 3 PMs · Engineering · Agency
TIMELINE
July – December 2025
PLATFORMS
iOS · Android · International Website
Overview
I joined Fanatics Markets with two months to go before our planned launch. The project was still taking shape, with no working product and much of the core experience still needing to be designed.
At the time, the design team was just me and one other designer. I took ownership of Catalog & Discovery while helping define the broader product alongside Product and Engineering, grow the design team, and get Markets ready to ship.
At the same time, I was splitting my focus with Sportsbook during NFL kickoff, the biggest moment of the year for the business. It was a fast, messy, and exciting two months that meant figuring out what mattered most, making decisions quickly, and helping build both the product and the team at the same time.
01. Designing for a new kind of bettor
Fanatics wanted to move quickly into prediction markets, with the opportunity to reach customers beyond the states where traditional sports betting was available.
Prediction markets were still a very new space. Kalshi was trailblazing, but no one had really established what the category should look like yet. New competitors were emerging quickly, and everyone was figuring it out in real time.
For design, that created an interesting challenge. The product needed to feel familiar to existing Fanatics customers while introducing a very different way of participating. “Bets” became “trades,” “odds” became “contract prices,” and the catalog expanded beyond sports into politics, crypto, pop culture, and more.
We chose to stay sports-first, using familiar patterns where they helped reduce the learning curve while creating new ways to explore everything prediction markets could offer.
With the industry changing just as quickly as we were building, I created shared spaces in Slack and FigJam where Product and Design could continuously track new competitors, patterns, and ideas as they emerged.
02. Designing discovery without predictable inventory
I owned the Markets catalog experience, essentially everything from the moment a customer entered the product until they were ready to place a trade.
Unlike Sportsbook, having an event on the calendar didn’t mean we had something customers could trade. We depended on our pricing provider to make markets available, and for sports that often didn’t happen until much closer to the event. Even once a market was available, liquidity could vary.
That made discovery especially challenging. We needed to help customers find what was actually tradeable while still making the product feel active, useful, and worth exploring.
That included the home experience, navigation, search, A–Z, categories, trending and popular content, promotional surfaces, widgets, event pages, and both pre-match and live experiences. I also helped evolve the design system for Markets, defining new patterns, iconography, interactions, and haptics where our existing Sportsbook system didn’t quite fit.
There were no traditional PRDs to work from. Product, design, and engineering defined the experience together as we built it, often moving from a conversation or an urgent business need to a designed and tested solution within days.
03. Designing at launch speed
When I joined Markets, we were aiming to launch in roughly two months (😱) and be the first major sportsbook to enter the prediction markets space.
We did ✨not✨ have our shit together. Entire flows and screens were still missing from the customer journey, Engineering didn’t have a working build, and there were no traditional PRDs. A request could be as simple as, “We need crypto markets ASAP,” and we’d figure out together what that actually meant.
Design, Product, and Engineering worked in lockstep. We made decisions in real time, tested builds as soon as they became available, bashed bugs together, and constantly adjusted scope. Moving quickly meant knowing when an existing Sportsbook pattern was good enough and when Markets genuinely needed something new.
Just days before our planned September launch, a provider issue introduced potential regulatory risk to Fanatics’ existing sportsbook business and we pulled the launch. We shifted quickly, adapted the product around a new provider, and prepared for a December launch.
04. Building the team while building the product
As Markets grew, I helped interview and onboard new designers, establish team rituals, organize our files and workflows, and create the structure we needed to work effectively as a new team.
I also stepped outside my immediate product area when other teams needed support. When our international team was stretched thin building the Markets website, I was able to lean on my previous Core Product web experience, quickly learn their design system, and use AI to accelerate the creation of a large set of account flows. It helped take execution work off their plate so they could stay focused on the larger website experience.
By the time we launched, we had grown the design team while building an entirely new product alongside it.
