The Club We Love Discovery

Discovery — A Bold Vision for Football, Made Buildable.

Who

The Club We Love is a UK-based startup with a bold idea: every professional sports team in the world should have a Social Membership strategy, and they're going to be the ones who make that possible. Their product is a white-labelled social platform that football clubs can launch as their own, fans never see The Club We Love name, they see their club's brand. The business is built on the belief that fan engagement is about to be transformed, and they want to be first.

What

A platform like this is easy to describe in a sentence and very hard to scope. The Club We Love wasn't one product but six interlocking ones: a club-branded newsfeed, a fan mapping tool that helps supporters find each other geographically, a group system for fan communities, an onboarding flow capturing rich fan profiles, an admin dashboard for clubs, and a master dashboard for The Club We Love themselves, plus the cross-functional plumbing that ties it all together. Every module had multiple user types, every user type had its own needs, and every feature came with a fork in the road: essential, nice-to-have, or future. JP came in with a vision, an initial budget, and a window to get to market before anyone else did the same thing. What he needed was a discovery phase that could turn all of it into something a team could actually build.

The project included:

Pull six modules apart and put them back together as one product, without losing the connections that make the platform work

Translate the vision into user stories a development team could pick up and build, written from real users' perspectives, not feature lists

Define a costable MVP that fit the initial budget, without gutting the product or quietly overcommitting

Map the post-MVP roadmap so nothing important got lost, Stretch Goals, Next Iteration, and the rationale behind every decision

How

We started with market research, putting the major football, sports, and community apps under the microscope so the workshops had something to push against. From there, three stages across three weeks on a single collaborative Figma whiteboard. Ecosystem mapping first: each of the six modules workshopped in turn, needs, user actions, user types, opportunities. Wide and generous, no idea off the table. Refinement turned the thinking into user stories. "As a fan, I want to find other fans in my local area." That sentence is the unit of work everything else runs on. We ended with over a hundred. Then the hardest part. A prioritisation workshop with design, development, product, and JP himself, every story placed into MVP, Stretch Goal, or Next Iteration. Every cut had JP's sign-off in the room.