From pro athlete to tech director: How a career transition is like learning a new sport

Blog

Aug 08, 2024

Jessie Niles

When you’re learning to play a sport you’ve never played, it’s going to feel uncomfortable and awkward at the beginning. You’re showing up on day one and have to learn the rules of the game, be adaptable, and have a growth mindset. 

That’s how I think of a career change, like when I joined the StellarAlgo team and the tech industry which was new to me. 

My background is in professional sports and I played for the Canadian Women’s National Volleyball Team for seven years, and overseas professionally for four. After my volleyball career, I completed my Master’s degree in Management Analytics. StellarAlgo is a mix of my passions in sports and data, and it really stood out to me that its customers are some of the most recognizable brands in the sporting world, like the NBA and NHL. 

I had so much experience as an athlete, but I quickly realized the operations and business side of the sport you don’t get as much exposure to as you might think. I’m still always learning about how the industry operates specifically with technology. 

I started at StellarAlgo as a student, then as a Data Strategist, and three years later I’m the Director of Product Impact. It’s a rapid evolution that’s been super exciting, and now I’m focused on our customers and keeping their needs front and centre. 

My fellow Product Impact team members, Tom Duncan, Cait Bell, and myself (right) on a hike in Banff during our annual ProBowl retreat. It’s an event where the entire company comes together in person for strategic planning and team building.

Seeing customer impact in action

The Product Impact team is all about driving engagement and adoption from our customers and users. We’re always looking for opportunities to contribute to projects that would make an impact across our customer base. For example, we developed an Industry Trends Benchmarking Dashboard Program so we can look across all of our customers to see how they’re performing. 

With this dashboard, we can answer customers’ questions like: 

  • How fast are they attracting new fans? 
  • How many fans are coming back to multiple games in the season?
  • How well are they doing at retaining their most valuable customers, season ticket holders? 

We built out the technical infrastructure and now it’s a tool that can be used widely across our company to answer customer questions and assess performance holistically. It used to be a manual process to pull all the numbers across the industry but now we’ve automated the industry trends benchmarking so it saves us a lot of time. Now at the click of a couple of buttons, we can see the most recent trends for our customers. 

Recently we’ve been focused on personalized one-on-one support for our customers, like our NBA partners. Since the league is our customer, we’ll be delivering our platform across all 30 NBA teams and it’s rewarding to hear firsthand the success stories of how our product is helping our customers. The Portland Trail Blazers for example, used the StellarAlgo segmentation toolkit and automated insights to beat the NBA’s projected renewal rate for the team and saw 13.5x ROI. 

I presented at the Sports Loft Summit in London about how StellarAlgo is helping leagues reach and engage their fans and share customer stories. It was a great opportunity to represent our company and celebrate the growth we’ve had and where we’re heading. 

Growing at a startup means you get to forge your own path 

The opportunity and space to forge my own path at StellarAlgo is exciting. We’re not a large multinational corporation where it’s super clear what all the steps and roles are. We’re a startup and it’s not all linear, which I enjoy. There’s an opportunity to regularly evaluate your strengths, what the business needs, and what you’re interested in. You’ve got autonomy and support from leadership to craft your journey with the company.

So if you asked, what’s next for me in my career at StellarAlgo? I can’t tell you definitively, but I know it’ll involve interesting projects that will make an impact on the business and our customers. We’re a growing company and I’m confident those opportunities will continue to come and that’s super exciting for me. 

The growing StellarAlgo team in Banff, Alberta at our annual ProBowl retreat. 

How I felt supported becoming a people leader 

This is my first people leadership role in my post-professional sports career. I’ve certainly been in leadership positions as an athlete, and throughout my education, but the opportunity to now translate that into a professional setting has been an awesome challenge. 

I think of it like a player-coach relationship where I’m still on the court, working with customers and executing projects. On the flip side as a coach, I’m helping set strategic direction for the team and evaluating performance and the impact of our efforts. 

Managing a team is a whole new skill set to learn, like a whole new sport. In my onboarding, there were lots of opportunities to observe and ask questions from my manager and our leadership team.

I truly feel that everybody on the team wants everyone to succeed. There’s a degree of respect that the StellarAlgo team gives to each other, whether it’s a peer, an executive, or someone more junior. I think that creates a lot of psychological safety so you have the space to ask questions, to learn, and to experiment.

See our current job opportunities at StellarAlgo here

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