A shared clock nobody is allowed to lose to.

The difficult part

A live draft is a multi-step, time-bound, shared-state flow. Several people are in it at once, a clock is running, and the interesting design question is not what happens when everyone participates. It is what happens when someone stops.

On top of that, the competitors had trained people to expect clutter. Existing fantasy apps are player-centric, which flattens the team dynamics that make the thing fun, and joining a league was complicated enough that people gave up before playing.

What I designed

Real-time draft picking with per-turn timers and auto-pick lists, so a user who goes quiet does not stall the room. A team-based drafting system replacing the player-focused approach. A quick league create and join flow, aimed directly at the complaint that starting was harder than playing.

Around the draft itself: a personalised home screen, integrated chat, multiple game modes and seasonal challenges to cover the off-season gap, clear point systems with live scoring, leaderboards, and notifications the user can actually configure.

How it was researched

Secondary analysis of forums and social platforms, plus structured interviews with four active fantasy sports users and the founder. The finding that shaped the product: people wanted simplicity, and they wanted a genuinely different experience rather than a reskin of what already existed.

What it was measured on

Daily and monthly actives, session length and retention, plus one metric specific to this product: draft completion rate, with drop-off analysis. We tracked where in the draft people abandoned, which is the only way to design the fallback behaviour honestly rather than guessing at it.