Unifying Rewards: Building a Platform-Wide Loyalty Experience
Turned one of DraftKings' most underutilized retention tools into a unified, discoverable experience across every vertical on the platform.
Type:
Platform Design
Role:
Product Design Director
Year:
2025-2026
Overview
DraftKings’ rewards program was one of its most powerful retention tools, but it lacked visibility. Key experiences were fragmented across surfaces and products, making it difficult for users to understand what they had earned or how to engage.
As Product Design Director, I led a cross-functional effort to unify rewards into a cohesive, platform-wide system. The work required aligning multiple product and engineering teams, managing highly opinionated stakeholders, and balancing platform consistency with the needs of individual verticals.
The Challenge
Despite its value, the rewards experience was fragmented across two separate surfaces: the Rewards Center (promotions and rewards earned) and Dynasty Rewards (loyalty program), owned by different teams with little coordination. For users, this created a disconnected experience with low visibility and unclear value.
Unifying the experience introduced both product and organizational complexity:
Each vertical had distinct user behaviors and business goals
There was no shared model for how rewards should function across the platform
Stakeholders had competing priorities around ownership and differentiation
The Casino vertical presented the most significant challenge. Their users are highly rewards-driven, and the team had strong concerns about losing differentiation within a unified system. Aligning on a shared approach required navigating deeply held perspectives while maintaining a cohesive platform vision.
Approach & Solution
I anchored the work in a clear principle: rewards should feel like a natural part of the user experience, not a separate destination.
To achieve this, we:
Shifted rewards from destination to system
Redefined rewards as an integrated layer across the platform, embedding them into key user flows rather than isolating them in standalone surfaces.
Established a unified model across verticals
Created a consistent navigation and interaction framework that worked across products, while allowing for flexibility where it mattered most.
Grounded decisions in user behavior
Used competitive analysis, user interviews, and usability testing to evaluate multiple approaches, ensuring solutions held up across different user segments and engagement patterns.
Led alignment across complex stakeholders
Facilitated working sessions across teams, allowing stakeholders to explore independently, then converge around shared solutions informed by user feedback.
The casino vertical required a more tailored approach. Rather than forcing alignment, we worked collaboratively to test solutions across verticals and identify what could scale. Casino ultimately aligned with the unified launch approach, paired with a post-MVP commitment to introduce earlier rewards touchpoints within their product, balancing immediate consistency with longer-term flexibility.
Impact
The redesigned rewards experience drove measurable increases in engagement across key loyalty touchpoints, with Program Info interactions up 114% and Key Benefits up 25%. Milestone redemption rates increased by 3.24%, and the average time to redeem dropped by 24 minutes, which indicated a more intuitive rewards flow. Together, these improvements made the rewards program easier to discover, understand, and engage with.