Jeremy Tripp

I've never met a product or sports tech leader with enough bandwidth to ship every good idea they have. Focus is not about what you do. It's about what you choose not to do. Jason Cohen says it perfectly. In fan experience, especially on the tech side, the pressure is always to add MORE. More features. More content. More integrations. New ideas are intoxicating. They are fun, energizing, and way more exciting than revisiting the operational grind of matchday. Updating concession menus. Planning for the next POS refresh. Building a kit launch campaign that actually works. But the endless MORE approach rarely serves fans. And for small, scrappy teams, it quietly burns the most precious resource we have. 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲. This is the classic product dilemma. Choosing one path often means letting ten others go, at least for now. That's uncomfortable. Especially when the calendar never stops. The next match. The next campaign. The next schedule drop, kit launch, or theme night. Short-term urgency crowds out long-term impact. The hard truth is that the experiences fans dream about take time to build. What works for us at CITY is discipline around focus. We always maintain a 12-month roadmap. The upcoming quarter is essentially locked. The following quarter is firm but flexible. The back half is intentionally loose and filled with nice-to-haves. Time sensitive campaigns are layered in based on immovable dates. Here is the key. In any given year, we expect to deliver maybe three or four truly meaningful features. Some years it's fewer. Last year, it was only two: Zippin walkout market integration and a full internal rebuild of CITY Pay. Both were massive. Both were worth it. So how do you decide what earns a spot? It's a little art and a lotta science. Intuition paired with data. Find the single biggest point of fan friction and eliminate it. If you don't know where to start, listen harder. Fans will tell you. Post-match surveys. NPS gaps. Social channels like Facebook and Reddit where opinions are unfiltered. Better yet, attend a match as a fan. Walk the building. Stand in lines. 𝗙𝗲𝗲𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗻. Make a list of the friction points that technology can realistically solve. Then estimate impact and ROI as best you can. You will always have more opportunities than capacity. 𝘈𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴. We treat our roadmap as sacred for planning and budgeting. At the same time, we maintain a parking lot full of ideas that could fill a decade of roadmaps. The real leadership question is never what to build next. It's what you are willing to stop building to make room for something that actually changes the game for your fans. If you HAD to choose one fan problem to obsess over and ignore everything else, what would it be? 🔗 to Jason's post that inspired these musings: https://lnkd.in/gT2wUF9a