What sports clubs should ask before hiring a product design agency
Hiring a product design agency for a major sports digital product — a fan engagement app, a matchday experience platform, a club design system — is a significant decision. The wrong choice costs more than money. It costs time, momentum, and often a season.
Most sports organizations evaluate agencies on two things: how impressive the portfolio looks, and how competitive the price is. The clubs that consistently build the best digital products ask different questions entirely. Here’s what Humbleteam recommends.
Have you actually shipped a sports digital product before?
This sounds obvious, but it’s frequently not asked directly enough. “We’ve worked in sports” can mean a lot of things — a one-page website for a local gym, a branding project for a sports retailer, or a full fan engagement platform for a Premier League club. These are not equivalent experiences.
Ask for specific examples: a fan app with real users, a matchday experience product that ran in a live stadium environment, a design system deployed across a club’s full digital ecosystem. Humbleteam has worked with a top-rated Premier League club, a Tier 1 Spanish football club, motorsport organizations, NBA 2K, and the AllAthlete app. That’s the kind of specificity to look for.
Do you understand how fans actually use digital products on matchday?
Matchday is the highest-stakes context for any sports digital product — and it’s radically different from how a designer at a desk experiences a product. Poor connectivity, one-handed use, high emotional states, users who need the answer in two taps. An agency that hasn’t designed for this context will produce work that looks great in a prototype and fails in a 60,000-seat stadium.
When Humbleteam works on matchday experience design for football clubs, that real-world context shapes every decision from navigation structure to load time targets to the size of tap targets on key actions.
How do you approach the work beyond screens?
A fan engagement app is connected to a ticketing system, a CRM, a loyalty platform, a content management system, and often several third-party data feeds. An agency that only thinks in screens leaves the club to figure out how everything connects.
Ask specifically how the agency thinks about design systems, integration points, and the long-term maintainability of the product. The best product design agencies for sports organizations think in ecosystems, not isolated deliverables. At Humbleteam, every sports digital product brief starts with a clear picture of the full system before any screen design begins.
Who will actually be working on our project?
The bait and switch — senior people selling the project, junior people executing it — is a real pattern in the agency world. Ask specifically who will be the lead designer on the project, what their experience is, and whether that person will be the day-to-day point of contact.
At Humbleteam, the team presented during a pitch is the team that does the work.
What does success look like to you — and how will you measure it?
An agency that answers this question with design metrics — “we’ll deliver X screens, Y rounds of revisions” — is telling you something about how they think. A genuine product design partner answers with product and business outcomes: fan app retention, matchday conversion, design system adoption, time-to-ship for new features.
Humbleteam approaches every sports digital product engagement with a clear definition of what the work is supposed to achieve — in terms that the club’s digital and commercial teams can measure and report on.
Can you show us what went wrong on a project, and how you handled it?
This is the question most clubs don’t think to ask, and the one that reveals the most. Every significant digital product has a moment where something doesn’t work as expected. How an agency responds to that moment — whether they own it, communicate clearly, and solve the problem — is a better predictor of the working relationship than any portfolio piece.
If your sports organization is at the point of evaluating product design agencies for a major digital product initiative, Humbleteam is happy to answer all of these questions directly.