Nike+ Training Club

Pioneering the headless CMS to cross-platform native mobile apps.

For earlier versions of NTC, to roll out just one new workout was a huge investment. We reduced the average time-to-market from 6 weeks down to just 1 week — a dramatic operational cost reduction. In the 18mo prior to the release of the content platform product, 50 workouts were produced. But after, 150+ new workouts were generated in just 3mo. That's 3x the volume in 1/3 of the time, all while using real-time validation to strengthen the quality.)

And the app to soared to record hights with year-over-year performance:

+88% weekly active users

+150% workouts started

+34% new members

Nike+ Training Club is the ultimate personal training mobile app. It's repeatedly earned Apple’s Editors’ Choice for fitness, and has been downloaded 30 million times. It currently has over 6 million active users across iOS and Android, and is available in 20 languages in 146 countries.

NTC is Nike's first-ever native mobile app. It made its debut in January 2009, and grained an impressive following within women's fitness.

Despite iterative updates and improvements over time, the app's potential to grow and evolve alongside Nike's broader business strategy was limited. In 2015 Nike set out to build an all-new version of NTC using modern technology that would set the product up for success for years to come.

My team developed a mission critical content platform product to house and serve the app the very thing it's famous for — workouts. This includes all of the accompanying assets (video, images, localized audio and text) and meta (skill level, intensity, duration or focus area) needed to compose, test, refine and ship premium workouts.

Through a series of design thinking exercises we envisioned and successfully presented the concept of a decoupled CMS (where the back-end CMS and front-end app are separate entities that communicate via a bespoke content service manifest). While the concept of a "headless" CMS is commonplace today, it was unheard of for the time. It was certainly the first of its kind for any experience at Nike, and had never before been done for any native mobile application of scale from any app publisher.

My role as product lead was to partner closely with the Nike Master Trainers and app development team to decipher the requirements and organize the roadmap into a sharp product vision, mitigating risks and ruthlessly prioritizing. Given the high visibility of this work extra care was taken to over-communicate and manage stakeholder expectations.

With an incredible but lean team, on a shoestring budget, and in an entirely too compressed timeline, Nike+ Training Club v5 launched in 2016 behind a massive media blitz. The content platform brought life to many desirable features, such as:

Dual gender to extend audience reach

Extensive workout catalog to offer variety, with new options for duration, body weight and equipment

Personalized training plans that adapt to you and your schedule

Workouts created by the world's best trainers, pro athletes like Serena Williams and Cristiano Ronaldo and even celebrity guests

Following the initial launch I helped guide through the planning of subsequent releases for bug fixes and major new features, like the re-introduction of yoga (the top user request after it was phased out of an earlier version of the app), collections, and unlockable challenges + achievements.

Nike+ Training Club Yoga

NTC Authoring Experience

NTC Laydown

NTC Collections