01
The product risk
Success can create more surfaces than customers can hold in their heads.
From promotion-led browsing to visible rewards and progress
Product Coherence
When Products Grow Faster Than Their Design
How shared product criteria kept new value from making a growing casino experience harder to understand.
Leadership Question
How do you keep a fast-growing product coherent when each local addition makes sense on its own?
Product CoherenceNavigationInformation ArchitectureDecision Criteria
The Story
Success created the harder problem.
The Director-level signal is knowing how to help a fast-growing product add value without becoming harder to understand.
Opening move
FanDuel Casino was not short on ways to give customers value. The harder problem was making that value easy to notice, understand, and return to.
John did not own the entire product. He led design in key Casino, Growth, and Generosity areas, supporting decisions across rewards, loyalty, promotions, research, and engagement.
What John shaped
I led design strategy within key Casino, Growth, and Generosity areas, focusing teams on the product questions that had to be answered before another campaign, mechanic, or surface was added.
Why it mattered
Growth made the product richer. It also made the customer story easier to lose.
Who had to decide
Product, design, engineering, analytics, CRM, research, marketing, games, operations, and delivery partners
Public Product Context
The public references make the visible change concrete.
They provide context for a product that increasingly surfaced rewards, progress, and reasons to return alongside browsing and promotional entry points.
Game browsing and promotional entry points
Rewards as a persistent destination
02
The customer need
Customers need to see what is available, what they earned, and why to come back.
03
The leadership work
Design helped teams make better calls about rewards, promotions, research, CRM, and measurement.
Category-led discovery
Reward mechanics became more concrete
Director-level takeaway
The visible change was not more promotion. It was a product learning how to explain its value.
The VP read: John helps fast-growing products become easier to understand instead of more fragmented.
Turning Point
Three decisions made the work more than a set of screens.
These were the calls that kept the story from becoming another collection of reward surfaces.
Tension
Local success vs. product coherence
Tradeoff
A campaign or feature could work in isolation while adding another competing entry point to the product.
Resolution
I used shared criteria to test how each addition affected hierarchy, navigation, and the customer journey.
Tension
More mechanics vs. better orientation
Tradeoff
New engagement ideas could add energy before customers understood the value already available.
Resolution
The work prioritized findability, explanation, and progress before adding more depth.
Tension
Team boundaries vs. one customer journey
Tradeoff
Different teams owned campaigns, CRM, rewards, games, navigation, and measurement, but customers did not see those boundaries.
Resolution
Shared product questions let teams discuss the effect of local choices on the whole experience.
What this proves
Fast-growing products rarely fragment because one team makes an obviously bad decision. They fragment because many sensible local decisions accumulate without a shared view of the customer journey.
I led design strategy in key product areas by bringing the questions forward: What job does this addition serve? Where does it belong? What must customers understand? What does it make easier or harder elsewhere?
The public surfaces make the change in emphasis visible across navigation, merchandising, rewards, and progress. The leadership work was the decision discipline behind them: helping teams evaluate additions as parts of one product.
What I would do differently: introduce the four product questions earlier, before sensible local additions accumulated into a harder journey.
Outcome
Great products do not become coherent by accident.
They get there when teams make hundreds of better decisions over time.
Outcome
Established a repeatable set of questions for evaluating new surfaces and mechanics in the context of the whole product.
Outcome
Put value visibility and product orientation ahead of adding deeper engagement mechanics.
Outcome
Made changes in product emphasis visible across hierarchy, navigation, rewards, and progress.
Director Signal
Leadership signal
The leadership practice was to help teams see the whole product, agree on decision criteria, and sequence additions so local progress did not create customer-level fragmentation.
Leadership Conversations
Building product ecosystems, stronger teams, and sharper executive alignment.
Open to Product Design Director opportunities across growth, platform, loyalty, and product ecosystem leadership.
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Based in the U.S. and open to product design leadership opportunities.