Context

My Role : Feature Owner

Team : 1 Designer | 1 Product Manager

The org's head of product was researching what new features could be added to boost engagement and create repeat visits to https://play.immutable.com to acquire and retain users to deliver to other business as B2B2C value.

One of the top ideas on the table was a tiktok style feed that would aggregate global video game news and interperse that feed with Immutable products and games, very similar to the tiktok algorithm that splits organic content to revenue generating content (ads and sales) in a loose 75/25 ratio. 

Action

As just a team of two, I proposed we could just build a prototype for internal testing instead of attempting to get feedback on a classic working Figma prototype. I was able to leverage Claude and build a prototype in less than a day that aggregated games news from Youtube, Twitch, and RSS feeds for video game publications (e.g. - IGN) and interperse that with content of games built on Immutable from Youtube. This allowed us to quickly test what is a healthy ratio of organic vs inorganic content and what barebones features are table stakes.

Within just a day, I was able to prototype a simple web experience using javascript for frontend that leverages public APIs provided by these services. All of this was done using Claude in Cursor. I then deployed the webapp on Netlify so I could easily share it to anyone who needed to test it internally or externally.

You can test the prototype yourself here
https://gamerfeed.netlify.app/

GitHub repository
https://github.com/bramb000/games-news-feed

Within 4 days we were able to quickly validate the requirements and scope of this project which was greatly assisted by a working, browser based prototype.

Result

The project did not proceed past the first few iterations as a prototype as we quickly discovered the challenges of scaling it and the degree of its alignment with the company's strategy was a core prohibitve factor.

Learning

The lack of success on the project itself was far outweighed by the immense success of being able to execute concept to working prototype in hand within a day to validate at speed. This was one of my first AI assisted projects and was a core instigator of my AI adoption to increase speed 100x. In my previous life as an amateur engineer such a project would have taken me at least 5 days.