Sportradar: tools for sports odds traders

In one sentence

At Sportradar I led a team of designers building tools for traders who set sports betting odds, including live.

Role and team

From October 2022 to June 2025 I was the Odds Product Design Manager at Sportradar. My team designed tools for internal traders.

My team was 2 seniors and 1 junior who was retraining from QA to UX design. For more than a year we were also supported, through body leasing, by 2 more strong seniors working permanently in product squads.

Who we designed for

Sportradar sells bookmakers odds on sporting events. The traders my team designed for made decisions about adjusting the odds to the current situation: before a match to new information and market movements, during a match to what happens on the pitch. It is work under time pressure, where every delay or mistake costs money immediately, and a typical trader has 4–8 screens on which they follow everything at once.

Tools in this industry are moving towards automating reactions to market events, while a person can still influence the odds.

The tools covered both pre-match and live odds. Traders had automatic or semi-automatic sliders whose position they could correct, plus a huge number of manual settings for every event. My team designed these very complex interfaces.

The most important change: from UI to full UX

The key change for me was redefining what the designers' work was. Before, they worked mainly on the visual layer (UI), and I wanted them to run the whole UX process with confidence, from research to testing solutions. I managed to extend my people's skills in that direction.

I worked on several tracks at once: research with traders, workshops, mentoring, changing the scope of tasks in projects and taking part in discovery. Customer journey mapping was a standard tool in every project. The most important thing was shifting the mindset towards ownership of the whole. Step by step, the designers took over the process from understanding the problem to running workshops in their product teams, always together with product managers, analysts, architects, engineers and the traders themselves.

An organisation that changes what does not work

Sportradar was a very flexible organisation. If something did not work, we changed the concept together, including the designers' working model. At first the designers worked as a shared service team for the whole tribe. After a change of concept they were embedded in product squads.

The reason for moving into product squads was the domain. It is so demanding that moving designers between projects made it hard for them to get up to speed on each new one.