Endeavors.tv aimed to be an innovative livestreaming, matchmaking and e-sports platform – a natural evolution of the Sleepless Gamers "King of the Hill" tournament model. While Sleepless Gamers had a much leaner value proposition and narrow ICP, Endeavors.tv aimed to cater to a wide range of users, from those with a passing interest in single-player games, to e-sports enthusiasts, to budding streamers, to professional gamers. Given the broad user base and robust feature set, focus became critical. Trying to for a total "blue sky" could kill the project before it ever spread its wings. In talking to the team, it was clear that there were some divergent viewpoints on where this thing was headed. To get some clarity, I took the team through a diverge/converge exercise where we each filled out individual lean canvases, then synced up to share our thoughts and find common threads.

The four pillars segued very neatly into persona development: they allowed us to focus our research on specific themes. That being said, our capacity for research was limited – we all worked full-time jobs, and a lot of us, believe it or not, had personal lives. We took the leanest possible approach to persona development – an incentivized survey sent out via Reddit and Discord, triangulated with qualitative data from Reddit research (lucky for us, a large chunk of our ICP also happened to be active on Reddit). Once we had some data points, I synthesized the findings into a set of personas that combined demographic and psychographic data with that segment's hypothetical scores across the pillars. How much does this persona care about a personalized experience? Are they a lone wolf, or are they looking for a pack? Are they looking to build an e-sports career, or are they just here to have fun? These were some of the questions the pillars aimed to quantify.

Once we had our personas, it was naturally time to think pages and features. Like our personas, it would have been very easy to build everything and the kitchen sink. We needed to maintain focus. In order to help us do that, I put together an sample site hierarchy, and created a prioritization template for each potential page. The template captured the page title, its relative prominence in the user experience, a quick summary, and most importantly – a breakdown of key features /JTBD categorized across the four pillars. Comparing potential pages in this way allowed us to prioritize design and architecture work.

With a good sense of who were were building for, and what features we wanted for MVP, it was time to design. We agreed that the KOTH model was still the best bet for initial adoption – gamers who wanted a sense of community, had a desire to stream and get some views, but weren't necessarily getting that from Twitch. Dev was still in the process of nailing down the tech stack, which gave me some breathing room. I took the opportunity to build out a UI kit in Figma, including color and typography tokens and some basic components. This made sure any hi-fi designs going forward used a consistent visual language, reducing design debt down the line.