The next sportsbook
will not look like
a sportsbook.
It will be part media product, part game, part social ritual and part financial interface. Most of the industry is still redesigning the bet slip.
I work on the questions that do not fit neatly inside a roadmap: what the product becomes, where the value moves, which assumptions are expiring and what is worth testing before the market makes it obvious. The output is not trend theatre. It is a point of view, worked concepts, business-model logic and a decision.
The category is changing shape. The language around it is not.
- 01
The sportsbook is no longer the whole product.
The experience now begins in clips, streams, chats, creator shows, games and wallets. The app is one surface inside a much larger attention system. Keep treating it as the centre and you will keep arriving after the behaviour has already formed.
- 02
Odds are infrastructure, not an interface.
A price is brilliant at compressing probability, margin and liability. It is terrible at helping a new audience express an opinion. The trading language can stay underneath. The product language has to become human.
- 03
The match is the content. The moments are the product.
Ninety minutes is a broadcast unit, not a natural interaction loop. The useful product units are tension, momentum, stoppages, reveals and decisions. Design around those and the same event starts behaving very differently.
- 04
Your highest-intent moment usually happens on somebody else's screen.
The impulse appears while the moment is still live. Every switch, search and login after that is friction and decay. The most valuable product surface in the category may be the one your company does not own.
- 05
The next fan enters through participation, not loyalty.
They predict, post, play and argue before they sit through the full event. Participation is not the reward at the end of the funnel. It is often the first reason to care. Most fan journeys are instrumented one step too late.
- 06
A loop without an ending is not responsible design.
Faster feedback, more rounds and better reveals can improve a product and increase harm at the same time. That is not a compliance footnote. It is the central design problem. The ending deserves as much craft as the loop.
- 07
Roadmaps deliver certainty. The future arrives as ambiguity.
Delivery teams are built to reduce risk, protect commitments and ship what has already earned a place. Exploration has to question the place itself. Asking one system to do both is how bold ideas become harmless features.
Provocation is cheap.
A better decision is the work.
The dangerous ideas are not ridiculous.
They are reasonable for too long.
“We need more features.”
You probably need a different product grammar. Adding more modules to an inherited interface does not change what the product is, who understands it or why they return.
“Younger users will grow into the category.”
They are not unfinished versions of the current customer. Their habits are forming in products with faster feedback, stronger social identity and almost no separation between watching and playing.
“Personalisation means better recommendations.”
Real personalisation changes timing, format, context, risk and session shape. A reordered market list is merchandising with a machine-learning label.
“We will build it once the market is proven.”
Once the market is proven, the strategic advantage is gone. You can still ship the feature. You cannot recover the years in which the category learned around somebody else.
“Innovation belongs on the roadmap.”
A roadmap is where uncertainty goes after it has been reduced. The uncomfortable work has to happen before that: framing the question, testing the premise and killing the attractive ideas that do not survive contact with reality.
What is changing before the category admits it
A signal matters when it changes a decision, not when it makes a keynote sound current. I track the shifts that could alter product shape, distribution, economics or permission—and I keep the strongest argument against each one beside it.
Hover or tab through a point to see what it is. Positions are studio judgement, not measured data.
- The shrinking loopACCELERATINGTime between decision and result keeps collapsing
- Prediction becomes a formatACCELERATINGThe call is the content, not the checkout
- Play before watchACCELERATINGParticipation is the entry point, not the reward for loyalty
- The interface moves to the streamEMERGINGThe video player becomes the primary surface
- Unbundled consumptionACCELERATINGPeople consume moments; rights are still sold as seasons
Everyone wants the same customer. Nobody owns the whole moment.
Sportsbooks, media owners, gaming studios, platforms and rights holders are all moving into one another’s territory. The strategic opening is rarely where the activity is loudest. It is in the capability nobody can yet connect to the rest.
| Player | Live engagement | Content integration | Social mechanics | Data products | Creator tooling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sportsbooks | 4 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| Media owners | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 3 |
| Gaming studios | 3 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 2 |
| Streaming platforms | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Leagues & clubs | 1 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 2 |
Not inspiration. Something you could build from.
Each exploration starts with a provocation and keeps going until the product, user behaviour, commercial logic, dependencies and failure modes can be judged together. The point is not to look futuristic. The point is to make the next move more intelligent.
No polished case studies.
The unfinished edge is public.
SportsHack is an open R&D library for the ideas, interfaces and business models that could reshape sport, betting and media.
It shows how I think before the hindsight, the client language and the safe ending. Paid work applies the same discipline to your question, constraints and decisions.
Three ways to turn uncertainty into a decision.
Fixed fee, defined question, clear end point. Start with the smallest useful engagement. If the work does not create a better decision, it should not create a longer contract.
Strategic Exploration
One uncomfortable question, made usable
Bring me the question your roadmap keeps postponing. I turn it into a position, a set of product possibilities and a decision you can act on.
- The assumption behind the question, challenged properly
- Signals and adjacent behaviours mapped beyond the usual competitor set
- Three to five product or business-model directions
- A recommended experiment with success and failure criteria
- A clear view of what not to build, and why
Best for: Testing whether a space deserves real investment
Open a questionProduct Futures Stream
External R&D that keeps producing options
A standing stream of provocations, worked concepts and strategic options—before the market makes them obvious and expensive.
- One or two fully worked explorations every month
- A living map of signals, openings, dependencies and dead ends
- Concept narratives with UX, economics and operating implications
- Monthly decisions instead of monthly trend theatre
- Low demand on the internal team
Best for: Leadership teams that need more than the current roadmap can generate
Build a futures streamExploration System
Make the capability internal
I design the operating model, prove it on live questions and leave your team with a repeatable way to explore without turning it into theatre.
- A practical exploration model built around your organisation
- Decision gates, governance and ownership clarified
- Three live explorations used to prove the system
- Tools and templates for strategy, product and innovation teams
- A six-month pipeline of questions worth opening next
Best for: Organisations that want a durable exploration capability
Design the systemHow the work moves
- 01
Find the dangerous question
Not the broad theme. The decision underneath it: what you may build, stop, enter, own or deliberately ignore.
- 02
Break the inherited frame
I challenge the category assumptions, look at adjacent behaviours and separate genuine change from familiar ideas in new packaging.
- 03
Build credible alternatives
Product concepts, experience logic, business models, dependencies and failure modes—worked far enough to be judged rather than admired.
- 04
Force a decision
You get a recommendation, a first experiment and a clear view of what would change my mind. No innovation theatre and no report-shaped ambiguity.
I am not interested in predicting the future. I want to make it usable.
I work across product, innovation and strategy in the space where sport, betting, media, gaming and technology are collapsing into the same attention economy.
My experience includes Sportradar, where the boundaries between data, rights, product and betting were already becoming harder to separate. The lesson was not that convergence is coming. It was that most organisations can see it and still struggle to give it a product shape.
That is the work I do now: expose the assumption underneath a strategic question, look beyond the obvious competitive set, develop coherent product and commercial possibilities, and design the smallest experiment capable of proving us wrong.
I am deliberately independent. It lets me say the thing an internal team may already suspect, cross organisational boundaries without defending one function, and return with an answer that is useful even when the answer is no.
Provocation must lead somewhere
A sharp opinion is useful only when it changes a product choice, commercial model or experiment.
The concept has to survive reality
UX without economics is decoration. Strategy without operating constraints is fiction. The whole system has to make sense.
Killing an idea is progress
A disciplined no, reached early, is often more valuable than another optimistic pilot nobody knows how to stop.
What people usually need to know
- Is this strategy consulting?
- Not in the traditional sense. I do not sell workshops, transformation programmes or decks full of consensus. I take a strategic question, develop a point of view, turn it into product and commercial options, and help force the next decision.
- What do I actually receive?
- Depending on the question: a market and behaviour map, worked product concepts, UX narratives, business-model options, experiment briefs, decision criteria and a direct recommendation. The output is designed to be used, challenged and built from.
- Do you design or build the product?
- I work far enough into the product to make the idea coherent and testable. Your internal team or delivery partner usually takes it into detailed design and production. I can stay close where the concept needs protecting through that transition.
- What if we already have strategy, product and innovation teams?
- Good. I am most useful as an external source of challenge and synthesis: able to cross the boundaries between those teams, work outside the active roadmap and return with something concrete enough for all three to judge.
- Which industries do you work in?
- Primarily sport, betting, gaming, media and the technology around them—especially where products, rights, data, creators and live attention are starting to collapse into the same commercial system.
- How much time will this take from my team?
- Usually one strong context session, access to the right material and a decision conversation at the end. The model is deliberately designed not to create another meeting rhythm inside your organisation.
- What if the conclusion is that we should not build anything?
- Then that is the answer. A credible no, with the evidence and assumptions exposed, is a successful outcome—and considerably cheaper than discovering it after a year of delivery.
- Why fixed fees?
- Because the value is in reaching a better decision, not in stretching the process. Scope, price and intended outcome are agreed before the work starts.
The one your roadmap
keeps finding reasons to postpone.
Tell me the decision, the tension and the constraints. I will tell you directly whether I can make it sharper—and what the smallest useful engagement would be. You speak to the person doing the work from the first message to the final decision.
Prefer to test the fit live?
Thirty minutes, no presentation. We identify the real question, whether it is worth opening and whether I am the right person to do it.
Book a fit checkA useful first message contains
- 01The decision you are trying to make
- 02The assumption or category rule you are least sure about
- 03The commercial, regulatory or organisational constraints that are real
- 04When the answer needs to become useful
Typical engagement
- Strategic Exploration€1–3k
- Product Futures Stream€6–8k / month
- Exploration System€20–30k
Start with the smallest question capable of changing a real decision. Bigger is not more strategic. It is usually just harder to judge.