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DraftKings - Rapid growth & a hard product pivot

My Role

VP of Product Design and User Research
July 2019 - September 2021

Opportunity

DraftKings is an American gambling company. It offers sports book and daily fantasy sports games. In May 2018, sports betting was legalized in the US, opening the market wide for entrants. I joined DraftKings 9 months later in July 2019.

DraftKings had big plans - expand products quickly to capture newly available marketshare and expand into newly legal states when they came online. To operate in each state, the state must legalize gambling, DraftKings needed to win a license, and DraftKings needed to get approved for gaming compliance and operating in the state. (Fun fact: Gambling is the 2nd most regulated industry, behind pharmaceuticals.) The organization needed to add functionality to meet states' bespoke requirements, and add innovative games and features to remain competitive in an increasingly competitive market. Shortly before I joined, DraftKings was sued for not making its products accessible to visually impaired individuals, so all of its products needed to become compliant within a 1-year timeframe.

DraftKings decided to go public in April 2020. But Mother Nature decided to throw a wrench in those plans - immediately before we went public, in February 2020 the pandemic hit, impacting the sports industry extremely hard. In March 2020, colleges started shutting down playing sports. Professional sports followed soon after. The sports industry was in a tailspin, and by extension, so was the sports gambling industry.

The goal: Scale the organization quickly, go public, and provide games for customers to play, all while no sports are available.
No sweat.

Solution

- Scale the team (10x!!!!), through organic hiring and inorganic company acquisition
- Scale the R&D process and upskill the design team
- Create and release products that were robust enough to be able to handle new state requirements, quickly
- Release new eSports functionality
- Release new Casino functionality
- Make the product accessibility compliant within (a court-ordered) 9 months

Outcome

The company grew rapidly. 10x in two years (!!!)
- From 300 people to ~3,000 in two years
- DraftKings reported $4.8bil in revenue in Q4 2024
- Accessibility compliant products

Because sports was not available, a quick pivot was made to add products to expand the product portfolio to allow people to continue to play:
- A rapid expansion of diverse games within the Casino - over 1,500 titles. This includes table games, and live dealer games available online, and sports-themed games.
- DraftKings legalized esports in many states and offered popular eSports titles, including Call of Duty, CSGO, League of Legends, Rocket League. The amount of traffic increased 50x during the pandemic.

Other items worth mentioning

- R&D Tooling upgrade - Created a design system to be able to enable teams to build faster. It also enabled the products to become accessibility compliant within the timeframe required by a court order.
- A user-oriented shift - User research became essential to the organization to help teams understand how the players think and how they want to play for various types of games.
- Improved customer support by integrating solutions into the product flow.
- DraftKings is known for its robust security measures to ensure that all games promote responsible gaming, in a variety of states with patchwork laws.