Cody Pellatiro Read.cv

2025 Autograph

Rebuilding an NFT collectibles company around sports fandom

Autograph began as an NFT collectibles company who then pivoted toward sports fandom with an app MVP. Our team came on after that launch. I helped facilitate the right strategy and design to mature and scale the app to 100K active users.

Company
Autograph
Role
Design manager
When
2023 – 2025
Scope
Design system, feature building, testing & research
Two Autograph phone screens over a stadium photograph, with the app icon between them.

In short

  • We came on after the MVP launched, into a company pivot from collectibles to sports fandom.
  • The design system was revamped so we could iterate on features quickly and find PMF.
  • We built multiple features from article reading, podcasts, IRL tickets and much more.
Retention increase from the streak feature
12%
Monthly active users (in 6 months)
100K
Two Autograph phone screens side by side under the headings Read and Listen: a Yahoo Sports article about a Lakers trade, and the same story as a Locked On Lakers podcast episode with a player.
Giving fans a choice on how to consume their favorite sports content

Problem

What we faced

The MVP had shipped with no shared patterns or a cohesive interface. We needed a way to up the level of polish as our user base grew and iterated towards product market fit.

Approach

Taking inventory

We audited what shipped: features, components, workflows. That set the baseline of our design overhaul.

The new system was built atomically, so it scaled from basic primitives up as we expanded.

Design system cards: primary button states, a type ramp, an icon set, toggle variants and input field states.
The foundations of the design system.

Iteration

Building and iterating

The biggest challenge was finding ways to balance scalability and cognitive load for our users.

The primary feed below saw a material change to the way we addressed navigation and overall information architecture across the app.

Two phone screens labeled MVP and Post-MVP, showing an earlier and later version of the same Autograph feed.
The team feed, MVP and post-MVP.

Replay

Daily sports news summarized

Replay condensed a daily dose of team coverage into one generated breakdown that was quick to digest and stay up to date.

The Replay sheet on a phone: a date picker, team avatars, a final score, and an AI-written recap of the game.
Replay: pick a date and a team, get the recap.

Features

Tickets, chat and profiles

Ticketing put local games in the app. Pick a game, filter the map by section and checkout.

Chat rooms shipped with threads, reactions and polls. Passports or profiles opened the wallet and held the on-chain collectibles + metrics.

A ticket picker with a stadium seat map and a purchase confirmation reading Enjoy Your Game, beside a photograph of a floodlit ballpark.
Buying tickets for local sports games.

Challenges

What got in the way

Some solutions already had buy-in, however we explored alternatives and ran user interviews to help move the designs and features along.

IP was the other blocker. Teams had to stay recognizable without licensed assets, so we used tokenized colors and generic marks.

Scope kept landing late, sometimes after handoff. We rolled it into larger Linear milestones and broke it back down as bandwidth allowed.

Reflection

Never underestimate a feature

A daily streak is about as small as a feature gets. Ours moved retention 12%.

No matter what you are building there is room to explore a new idea. My biggest wins trace back to small moments of exploration.

A profile sheet showing communities, reads, listens, plays and streak counts, beside a daily streak check-in sheet with a seven-day row.
The profile, and the daily streak check-in.