Built a player evaluation platform for youth soccer clubs this year. The hardest part wasn't the multi-tenant architecture or the Stripe billing. It was sun glare.

Coaches use this outdoors on a Saturday morning. One hand holds a whistle, the other holds the phone. Half the fields have no cell coverage.

None of that shows up in a feature list, but all of it decides whether the product gets opened a second time.

So the build changed. Dark mode became the default instead of a setting, because a bright screen is unreadable in direct sun. Tap targets got large enough to hit without looking down. Capture went offline-first with sync reconciliation, so a coach can rate forty players in a dead zone and lose nothing. Player safety flags surface on the card before evaluation starts, instead of sitting three taps deep in a profile.

The lesson I keep relearning: figure out where your user is physically standing when they open the app. That answer changes more decisions than the stack does.

sportformiq.com if you want a look.