A Product Vision for PokerStars
I led an innovation and research programme to define a bold, future focused poker vision for 2030+ for the World's largest Poker community PokerStars, capturing emerging opportunities, resonating with players, and setting a clear course of action for PokerStars.
Role: Design Director Sector: Online Gaming Date: 2025-26
Brief
Conduct a global research project to define PokerStars offering in 2030+ to ensure its future as the World’s most popular online Poker destination. The goal was to understand recreational players behaviours in poker and online gaming to attract them to play poker for the first time and come back to play more frequently, whilst retaining the essence of the poker game for skilled and professional poker players.
Why a PokerStars Vision?
The Poker landscape is becoming more competitive, and audience expectations are rapidly changing. PokerStars is seeing a decline in new younger players coming online, and challenges in operating in regulated markets. For PokerStars to continue to lead as a market leader they need to deliver something new to compete with competitors and attract new players.
My Role & Team
As the Design Director at PokerStars I led this future-vision initiative, with a team of two user researchers, a design strategist and a team of designers from across our global teams to support the workshops in 6 different locations, to help us imagine how poker will evolve beyond 2030. I planned the roadmap, designed and facilitated a series of ideation workshops and a run a vibe coding workshop, tested prototypes with customers and presented the key results to the PokerStars Executive team.
Research
I created a comprehensive programme of research informed by commissioning market trends report, using our customer insights, conducting stakeholder and player interviews and a series of innovation workshops, leveraging the knowledge and experience of PokerStars teams around the world, to built a direction – a North Star to guide decisions and inspire future work.
The research began with PokerStars Senior stakeholder interviews. Their quotes below
How do we make a game that takes hours to play, easy to dip-in and out of? Product Director
We should look at how to create a more compelling eco-system that benefits both live and online poker players.
Chief Operating Officer
We need to accommodate a wider base, including a younger and more female audience. International Product Director
Synthesized Research
From the stakeholder interviews, player focus groups combined with the data and research from our internal product, design, innovation, technology, marketing teams and external market and world tech trends reports and research we produced an insight report into the world of poker play and identified Seven Areas of Opportunity.
These areas were used to help structure the workshops, introducing these opportunities to the teams to get them to think more widely about the possibilities and use them as starting points for ideation. In the workshops at the end of Day 1 these were used for participants to vote on what area of opportunity they felt held the best opportunity.
Dublin Open Poker Tournament
Here we held focus groups with a mixture of professional and recreational poker players to hear what they wanted.
Key Themes
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Wanted personalised coaching to help them improve their game. Some had independent coaches.
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Loved interaction with with celebrities or sports figures at live events.
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Placed significant value on trophies, badges, and other forms of achievement recognition beyond monetary rewards, and wanted to display these in play.
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Community and connection emerged as crucial elements of the skilled player experience.
Workshops
We conducted a comprehensive programme of 1.5 day workshops in 6 locations, England, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, India, and Canada. The participants were a mixture of PokerStars colleagues in our global office locations with their extensive knowledge and experience of Poker product development and play, and a range of poker customers. The participants were introduced to a range of user centric methods to generate and validate ideas and experiment with AI tools to produce early prototypes.
Day 1 was all about exploration and ideation done in collaboration where ideas were developed and critiqued, then reworked. All the teams selected one idea to develop.
Day 2 was about further development of the chosen idea, creating a prototype using a wide range of media and presenting it to the wider group.
Final concepts presented
The output was 20 concepts, with 3 clear themes in the following order
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New game formats - faster and combining casino type games
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Personalised player progression - with personalised coaching that could utilise AI
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Loyalty and rewards with trophy cabinets and badges to display
Some of the concepts developed
Vibe Coding Workshop
To bring the Vision project to life and to share and engage more of PokerStars colleagues. I created and ran a remote Vibe coding Vision Workshop using Google AI Studio.
I asked for 40 volunteers across PokerStars to take 2 hrs out of an afternoon to work in pairs to create 20 prototypes from the 20 ideas from the Poker Vision workshops. As all came together for the introduction the atmosphere was buzzing!
The results were impressive from Google AI studio and all came back to present their prototypes. Beyond the creative outputs the workshop gave us:
1. Practical, hands-on prompt-crafting experience
2. Collaborative prototyping blending design, product thinking, and code.
3. Fresh ideas for how AI can elevate play, learning, and performance at PokerStars.
Here is one of the vibe coded prototypes.
This is a Poker Sports Book that uses the Sportsbook model of betting on sports, but here punters bet on poker players putting a bet on them winning, losing or game play.
Below are some screen outputs from the session.
PokerStars Arcade
PokerStars live TV
PokerStars Jackpot
Validation & Results
The prototype's allowed us to create designs to take to players for feedback. There were some clear winners such as faster games, PokerStars Arcade and Clubhouse, the AI Coaching tools such as Joker to Ace and Concierge, and interest in the PokerSports book concept.
These concepts are now being developed into beta designs to test with targeted groups of players.
I'd like to have an AI coach that could show me how to play better by tracking my game as this would be tailored to me. Poker player - Italy
I love the idea of being able to bet on Poker Players in the same way I can place a bet on a sport and trade out at any time!
Poker Player - Dublin
As poker games are long we need to bring in some snackable type games that you can play quickly when out of a game. Poker Player - Canada
Product Vision Framework
The Product Vision Framework is the model that now guides the User Experience for PokerStars. At the centre are the 3 core experience principles of HOW we create value, WHERE it fits into peoples lives and WHO we entertain.
It has been widely adopted and championed across the PokerStars business as a tool to use in product development, bringing in vision and innovation to practically steer the organisation to develop new concepts and balance with prioritising the product roadmap.
