Nike Training Club / AKQA
An innovative proprietary headless CMS back-end to power Nike Training Club (NTC), a flagship experience for the iconic brand.
The first native iOS/Android apps ever released by Nike, NTC launched with select workouts and wellness guides for women created by expert trainers at the company. But over time the content became stale and usage hit a plateau - so Nike set out to overhaul the entire concept, and both broaden the audience and supply a wide array of workouts so users at all levels could build dynamic, tailored plans to align with their specific goals.
With this in mind, and determined to sunset the outdated codebase and discover a more streamlined way to produce and release content (at the time a slow, labor intensive and expensive task) the company tapped AKQA to craft a solution - so the agency constructed a system from the ground up that transformed the process for content generation from a linear, waterfall workflow to a rapid and agile method inspired by atomic design principles.
While these implementations now commonplace, this marked the first time a mobile app at Nike (or elsewhere) employed a headless CMS. AKQA pioneered this with AEM, a technique which would not be officially supported by the platform until years later.
This custom software included an intuitive user interface that allowed authors with limited technical expertise to independently create, demo and publish workouts directly into the app in days, instead of months - an estimated 80% reduction in time and effort.
The app relaunched with 3x the workouts and a host of new capabilities to address the pain points of users and stats soared to record heights across the board.
As head of product for AKQA in Portland, ran point for an agile cross-discipline team to deliver the solution from 0 to 1:
- Coordinated immersion sessions on campus with key stakeholders across Nike to understand the current processes and assess their technical challenges and limitations, and unpack extensive consumer research that would guide the next iteration of the app.
- Led a series of ideation workshops to sketch out potential solutions, evaluate the risks of each and hone in on an approach that would not only solve the problem in the brief, but adapt and evolve with the app through its lifecycle.
- Pitched the proposed vision to executive leadership for acceptance, and outlined a scope and roadmap with detailed requirements, dependencies, risks and milestone schedule to govern the engagement.
- Oversaw the architectural design and each phase of development. Authored user stories and conducted all Scrum ceremonies along with demos at the end of each sprint to collect critical feedback on the build and kick off UAT.
- Defined the structure, taxonomy and resources required for the DAM to upload and convert over 100K source audio/video files recorded by the Nike production studio into a library of usable formats for authors to access when they composed content.
- Orchestrated a plan to quickly dispatch the first round of workouts into the CMS through automation, which cut weeks of labor down to days. Custom scripts uploaded metadata at a pace of 20 human authors on the clock 24/7, and significantly reduced errors that could compromise launch.
- Collaborated with Nike to integrate the company’s localization API into the CMS so that authors could translate content with just one click, and roll out all workouts in 20 languages across 140+ countries.