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Job Description
About GameChanger:
We believe in the life-changing impact youth sports have on and off the field. Sports encourage leadership, teamwork, responsibility, and confidence. These are important life lessons that have the power to propel our youth toward meaningful futures. We recognize that without coaches, parents, and volunteers, organized youth sports could not exist. By building the first and best place to experience the youth sports moments important to our community, we are helping families elevate the next generation through youth sports.
So if you love sports and their community-building potential, or building cool products is your sport, GameChanger is the team for you. We are a remote-first, dynamic tech company based in New York City, and we are solving some of the biggest challenges in youth sports today.
The Position:
GameChanger is launching a Studio team, a small, fast-moving group whose job is to answer one question: is this opportunity worth pursuing? Partnering with our Strategy team, the Studio takes new and emerging business ideas, like expanding into a new sport or entering an international market, and rapidly validates them with real customers. This lets us commit to the right bets faster and stop sitting on promising ideas because we lack evidence.
As the founding designer on this team, you’ll pair with a product manager to run focused validation sprints. Your toolkit is whatever the question demands: surveys, onsite ethnographic research, concept tests, prototypes in customers’ hands, market experiments, or a combination of all of the above. Your output isn’t a shipped feature. It’s confidence: a clear, evidence-backed recommendation on whether an opportunity deserves deeper investment and handoff to a product team, or whether we should walk away and move on to the next idea.
This role is different from a traditional product designer role at GameChanger. You won’t have a large supporting cast of researchers, engineers, and analysts embedded on your team. Instead, you’ll operate more like a founder, pulling in partners from User Research, Strategy, Product, Engineering, and beyond when you need them. If you’re energized by ambiguity, love learning new problem spaces from scratch, and would rather run ten scrappy experiments than polish one feature, this is your team. You’ll report directly to the VP of Design.
What You’ll Do:
- Partner with your PM and the Strategy team to turn emerging business ideas into sharp, testable questions, defining up front what “validated” looks like and what evidence would change our minds.
- Own validation sprints end to end: framing the riskiest assumptions, choosing the right method, running the work, and synthesizing what you learn.
- Select and execute the right research approach for each question, including surveys, customer interviews, onsite ethnographic research, diary studies, concept and prototype testing, and landing page or demand tests.
- Build prototypes at whatever fidelity gets an answer fastest, from paper sketches and Figma flows to functional, AI-assisted coded prototypes you can put in front of real customers.
- Use AI tools aggressively across the workflow to build faster, synthesize research at scale, and expand how much the team can evaluate with two people.
- Get out of the building. Recruit and engage real coaches, players, families, and prospective customers in new markets and sports.
- Deliver clear, honest go/no-go recommendations to leadership, backed by evidence, including the recommendation to not pursue something.
- Package validated opportunities (the insight, the evidence, the concept, and the open questions) for a smooth handoff to a product team to build.
- Collaborate with User Research, Data & Analytics, Strategy, Product, and Engineering partners as needed to get the job done.
- Help define how the Studio operates. As a founding member, you’ll shape the team’s playbook, cadence, and standards for what “enough confidence” means.
Who You Are:
- 5+ years of product design experience, ideally including 0-to-1 work such as early-stage startups, new product incubation, innovation teams, or founding a company of your own.
- A strategic thinker who’s genuinely curious about the business. You care as much about whether we should build something as how it would work.
- Entrepreneurial, self-motivated, and a doer. You don’t wait for a brief, a researcher, or a roadmap. You figure out the fastest path to an answer and go.
- Comfortable being on a bit of an island. You thrive with high autonomy and ambiguity, and you proactively pull in collaborators rather than waiting for a team to form around you.
- A capable researcher in your own right who can plan, recruit for, moderate, and synthesize qualitative and quantitative research without hand-holding.
- A versatile prototyper with range. You match fidelity to the question and can move from sketch to interactive prototype to something customers can actually use.
- Fluent with (or hungry to master) AI tools for design, prototyping, coding, and research synthesis, and excited about how they let a small team punch far above its weight.
- A strong storyteller who can distill messy, ambiguous findings into a crisp narrative and recommendation for executives.
- Intellectually honest. You’re motivated by finding the truth about an opportunity, not by making every idea look like a winner.
- Knowledgeable about (or passionate about learning) sports and the communities around them.
Bonus Points:
- You’ve founded or worked at an early-stage startup, or on an incubation, venture, or new bets team.
- Experience validating international expansion or entirely new market opportunities.
- Comfort with lightweight data analysis to size opportunities and interpret experiment results.
Perks:
- Work remotely throughout the US* or from our well-furnished, modern office in Manhattan, NY.
- Unlimited vacation policy.
- Paid volunteer opportunities.
- Technology stipend - $4,000 every 2 years after your start to make sure you have the latest and greatest technology.
- WFH stipend - $500 annually to make your WFH situation comfortable.
- Monthly physical, mental, wellness & learning stipend offered through Holisticly.
- Monthly lifestyle stipend offered through Fringe.
- Full health benefits - medical, dental, vision, prescription, FSA, HRA, HSA, and coverage for family/dependents.
- Retirement savings - Traditional and Roth 401K plans are offered through Vanguard, with an immediate company match.
- Life insurance - basic life, supplemental life, and dependent life.
- Disability leave - short-term disability and long-term disability.
- Company paid parental leave - up to 20 weeks for birthing parents and up to 12 weeks for non-birthing parents.
- Family building benefits offered through Progyny.
- DICK’S Sporting Goods and their family of brands teammate discount.
The target salary range for this position is between $140,000 and $160,000. This is part of a total compensation package that includes incentive, equity, and benefits for eligible roles. Individual pay may vary from the target range and is determined by several factors including experience, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations. We constantly review all teammate pay to ensure a great compensation package that is fair and equal across the board.
\* DICK’S Sporting Goods has company-wide practices to monitor and protect the company from significant compliance and monetary implications as it pertains to employer state tax liabilities. Due to said guidelines put in place, we are unable to hire in AK, DE, HI, IA, LA, MS, MT, OK, and SC.
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity in our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: All official recruitment communications from GameChanger will come from an email address ending in @gc.com or [email protected]. If you receive communication from any other domain, please be cautious, as it is likely fraudulent.
