The Athletic had grown into one of the most respected destinations for sports journalism — but the product experience hadn't fully caught up to its ambition. In the fall of 2025, The Athletic partnered with The New York Times and BlinkUX to run an 18-week envisioning initiative: a structured, research-backed effort to define what the product could become over the next three years.
The goal wasn't a redesign. It was a north-star vision — high-fidelity, user-tested, and grounded in a clear understanding of who The Athletic's most valuable user is and what they actually need.
I was The Athletic's design lead on the project. That meant directing a team of internal and external designers, owning the visual design decisions, and presenting the work to the CPO, GM, and senior editorial leadership throughout the process. My job was to hold the design vision across eighteen weeks, three organizations, and multiple rounds of research — and make sure what we delivered was coherent, craft-forward, and genuinely useful to the people we were designing for.
The project ran in three phases: discovery and strategy, concept ideation, and final design and prototyping. Research was woven throughout rather than front-loaded, with multiple rounds of concept testing that didn't just validate our thinking — they actively redirected it. We started by getting sharp on who we were designing for and what they actually needed, then moved from broad concepts to high-fidelity, prototyped, motion-integrated design directions.
The outcome shaped the product's three-year roadmap, with two core experiences identified as the focus for future investment.
The final work is confidential, so I'm not able to share it publicly here. But I'd genuinely love to walk you through it — the research, the concepts, the design decisions, and the story of how it all came together. If you're curious, reach out and I'll give you a closer look.
