The Problem
FieldLevel connects high school athletes with college coaches, and Premium membership is how the company makes money. But Premium adoption was sitting just under 4%: of roughly 279,000 active athletes, only 11,133 had upgraded. I set out to answer why. What was going well with Premium, what wasn't, and which feature, valuable to both athletes and coaches, could we improve to make the benefits unmistakable?
A deep dive into the data surfaced the answer. Letters of Interest, a Premium feature that lets athletes reach out directly to college coaches and generates up to 5x more profile activity when used, was barely being touched. It was buried in the app, and most athletes didn't know it existed, let alone what it could do for them. Meanwhile, 96% of athletes on free plans couldn't write letters at all.
College recruiting is already a stressful, daunting experience for high schoolers. Rather than throwing another feature behind the paywall, I decided to keep things simple: take the feature that already worked and bring it out of hiding.
A Premium athlete profile: videos, timeline, and evaluations in one place.
Discovery
Using the Double Diamond model, I combined quantitative platform data with qualitative research (surveys, coach conversations, and past learnings) to understand how many people were struggling and why:
- A Maze survey of 40 active athletes (free and Premium) found that 82% would be more likely to upgrade once they understood what Premium could do for them, and 87% were more willing to write a Letter of Interest after learning the benefits.
- Platform data showed letters worked when used, with a 29% success rate writing to followers, but very few athletes were writing them each month.
- Premium clearly drove exposure: Premium athletes were promoted to colleges 3.5 times per month on average versus 0.7 for free athletes.
- Coach education calls echoed the same gap: coaches found features like Letters of Interest valuable but didn't understand how they worked, and once they did, 100% found them worth paying for.
When my athletes upgrade, they get more activity. FieldLevel Premium allows me to target and recommend my athletes to more of the right colleges.
Club coach, during Premium education calls
The Premium FigJam board: research synthesis and ideation from the two-week sprint.
The synthesis pointed to one root cause, captured in the problem statement:
Athletes aren't signing up for Premium membership because of insufficient awareness and understanding of what Premium features can do for them. Our solution should clarify the benefits and make key features easy to access.
The Solution
I led a cross-team brainstorming session with product, engineering, and data to align on scope, and guarded that scope carefully to keep a two-week sprint from creeping. The solution came down to two focused moves:
- Change the verbiage. The existing copy left athletes confused: they didn't see the benefit of writing a letter or understand what happened after sending one. New, plainer language made the value and the next steps clear: less reading, more clarity.
- Merge Letters of Interest into the Target page. During discovery, most users assumed the feature lived where they targeted colleges; even FieldLevel team members thought it was already there. So we moved it to where everyone was looking.
The cross-team brainstorming session, live from FigJam: breakout groups, pain points, and How Might We exercises.
The Contacting Colleges Made Clear brainstorming board, live from FigJam.
Concept exploration: retire the buried LOI page and surface letters directly on the Target page, where athletes already expected them. (Recreated for this case study.)
Wireframe: each targeted college gets a clear, plain-language call to action, and a visible state once a letter is sent.
I iterated through two concept rounds in InVision, then built a Figma prototype and tested it with 45 athletes through Maze. Every Premium athlete completed the flow to write a letter, 93% said they understood the benefits of contacting colleges, and 88% said they'd start reaching out. Just as important, the design worked for free athletes too: the upgrade prompt made the value visible, 86% understood the benefits, and 75% said they would upgrade to Premium to get access. We shipped in two phases: new verbiage first, then the merge into Targets.
The shipped Target page: match strength, activity, and the contact letter, all on one college card.
The Impact
Within two months of launch, Letters of Interest written jumped more than 5x, from an average of 1.1 to 7 per athlete (a 515% increase). Overall Premium membership grew roughly 5%, and individual Premium membership grew roughly 15% in the same window.
The bigger lesson: sometimes the highest-impact design work isn't building something new; it's making something that already works impossible to miss. By clarifying one buried feature, we gave athletes a clearer path to the colleges they wanted and gave the business a meaningful lift in its core revenue stream.
The network athletes and coaches use today: requests, search, and suggestions front and center.
Want the full research breakdown behind this project, including surveys, synthesis, and prototypes? Get in touch.