Envorso Sports

Define an AI-Native Fan Platform Before the League Owner Dinner

You have just joined Curtain Call, a 9-person fan-experience startup, as the founding PM. Curtain Call is building a unified fan-experience platform for mid-tier professional sports leagues — minor league baseball, second-division soccer, regional rugby — leagues that can't afford to stitch together separate ticketing, mobile app, CRM, marketing automation, and merch vendors, but desperately want what the big leagues have: a unified, AI-personalized fan experience. Curtain Call is currently live with one team — the Eastside Otters of the Pacific Northwest Hockey League — with 18 months of runway. The CEO's plan is to expand to all 8 PNHL teams within a year, then jump to an adjacent league. You report to the CEO. You have 4 engineers (mid-junior, all remote, all in São Paulo) and one part-time UX designer. In 6 weeks, the CEO is hosting a private dinner with all 8 PNHL team owners. He wants you to walk into that room with three things ready to defend: A v1 product roadmap for the next 6 months — clear, opinionated, shippable. A point of view on one AI-native fan experience capability that would be the headline differentiator. A point of view on how your engineering team will operate differently to ship faster. The CEO keeps hearing "AI-native engineering" from competitors and wants to know what that actually means in practice for a 4-person junior remote team. A few things about your customers — assume these are accurate: The Eastside Otters' average fan is 52 years old. Most fans buy tickets before the day of the game — roughly an 80/20 split (before game day / day-of). About 70% of the team's revenue is gameday (tickets, add-ons like club passes or high-fives with the team, merch). 30% is season tickets and sponsorships. The team owners think in terms of butts in seats and revenue per fan, not DAUs or NPS. Most are not technical. They make decisions partly on personal trust. You have 50 minutes — including a short video — to put together what you'd actually bring to that dinner. This is not a complete product spec. It's the pitch. Constraints to Consider Engineering team is what it is. You can't hire a Staff Engineer this quarter. Your operating point of view must work for the 4 mid-junior remote engineers and one part-time designer you have today. v1 must ship within 8 weeks of the dinner — i.e., roughly 14 weeks from today. Anything you can't deliver in that window must be explicitly cut and named. The fan you're designing for is 52, not 25. If your v1 assumes a tech-native urban user, it won't work for the actual customer base. Most fans buy tickets before game day — many on their phones or via the team website in the days leading up — though a meaningful share still buys day-of at the gate. The audience for your video is the team owners, not your engineering team. Eight non-technical sports executives. They care about revenue per fan, fan retention, and league differentiation. They make decisions partly on trust. Frame accordingly. Curtain Call already has a unified data backbone. Identity, ticketing events, merch transactions, and mobile app behavior are already flowing into one warehouse. Don't pitch building a CDP from scratch — the platform exists. The question is what you do with it. AI Usage Guidance We expect you to use AI tools. We evaluate how you use them — not whether you use them. Evidence of iteration, redirection, and critical evaluation scores higher than a polished output with no process documentation.