NHL/NHLPA
Innovation Cup
Digital Redesign
Supporting the expansion of hockey engagement and building demographic insight infrastructure — leading a full lifecycle redesign of the competition's digital platform.
Client
NHL Innovation Cup
My Role
Product Leader
Scope
Full project lifecycle
Sponsors
Expanding hockey's reach —
and understanding who it reaches
The NHL/NHLPA Innovation Cup exists to grow hockey's presence beyond its traditional audience — inviting students to solve challenges around access, wellness, and underrepresented communities. My role was to support that mission directly: make the competition more discoverable, reduce barriers to participation, and — critically — build the infrastructure to understand who was actually showing up and why. I supported this project across its full lifecycle, from initial strategy through launch and measurement.
What was blocking engagement and insight
No demographic visibility
The team had no data on who was participating — which schools, which communities, which demographics were engaging or being left out entirely.
Friction in the registration journey
Participants had to enter information multiple times across disconnected systems — increasing abandonment at the most critical conversion point.
Poor discoverability
Missing SEO structure and a long, unmemorable domain meant the students the competition was trying to reach simply couldn't find it.
From discovery to launch — and beyond
I owned this project end-to-end as Product Leader, driving strategy, design direction, and development oversight across every phase.
Stakeholder alignment & problem framing
Worked directly with the NHL Innovation Cup group to surface pain points, define success criteria, and align on the core mission: expand engagement and build demographic understanding into the platform from the ground up.
Engagement & analytics strategy
Defined the data architecture needed to track participant demographics across the funnel. Mapped the competition's three pillars — education, wellness, access — to measurable engagement signals: who was visiting, from which schools, and where they were dropping off.
AI-assisted UX & visual design
Leveraged Midjourney for visual direction and brand concept exploration, v0.dev for rapid UI prototyping, and Claude for content strategy and information architecture. Designed a participant journey that reduced registration friction and surfaced eligibility, timeline, and competition pillars clearly for diverse student audiences.
Development oversight & SEO implementation
Directed development using GitHub Copilot to accelerate implementation. Oversaw full SEO buildout — semantic HTML, metadata, Open Graph tags, and domain migration to hockeyinnovation.com — ensuring the right communities could discover the competition organically.
Social distribution via Meta
Used Meta's advertising tools to support the competition launch — targeting student audiences across Bay Area universities and underrepresented communities to drive awareness and registration for the 2026 cycle.
Analytics infrastructure for ongoing insight
Built the foundation for the team to answer the core question going forward: who is participating, and are we reaching the communities this competition was designed to serve?
From fragmented to insight-ready
- No participant or demographic data of any kind
- Registration required duplicating data across systems
- No SEO — students couldn't discover the competition
- Long, unmemorable domain name
- No social distribution strategy in place
- No sponsor brand cohesion across the site
- Analytics architecture tracking demographics at every funnel stage
- Streamlined registration — single entry, zero duplication
- Full SEO: titles, OG tags, semantic HTML, sitemap
- Clean, searchable domain — hockeyinnovation.com
- Meta-powered audience targeting to student communities
- Cohesive visual system — NHL, NHLPA, SAP & Sharks Foundation aligned
Modern tools, applied with intent
Each tool served a specific purpose across the lifecycle — not as a shortcut, but as a force multiplier for a small team tackling a large scope.
Midjourney
Visual concept generation & brand direction
v0.dev
Rapid UI prototyping & component generation
GitHub Copilot
Development acceleration & code implementation
Claude
Strategy, content architecture & UX thinking
Meta
Audience targeting & student community distribution
A platform built to understand
and grow hockey's audience
The redesigned site launched for the 2026 competition cycle — giving the NHL Innovation Cup team the tools to track who is participating, reduce barriers to entry, and reach student communities that hockey has historically underserved.
0→1
Demographic analytics: from zero data to full funnel visibility
0
Duplicate registration steps in the redesigned participant flow
100%
Pages SEO-structured — up from none on the original site
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