Design Thinking Workshop

The brief

In April 2016, the old Beşiktaş home ground near Dolmabahçe Palace was replaced by a new 41,903-seat venue branded as Vodafone Park. Vodafone Park wasn't just a football venue. It was a multi-purpose property hosting concerts, corporate events, and daily operations for one of the most passionately followed clubs in Turkish sport. Beşiktaş fandom in Istanbul is generational; people don't pick a club, they inherit one.

Vodafone Park needed a digital-experience strategy. The default framing was: "design for the fan." We argued the brief was bigger than that.

The expansion

I co-led a design thinking workshop out of Fjord Istanbul, working with the client team to map experiences for everyone the property actually touched. Not just the season-ticket holder. The concession-stand worker logging in for a six-hour shift on match day. The maintenance crew servicing forty thousand seats every week. The vendor delivering supplies through a non-public entrance at five in the morning. The casual concertgoer who comes once and never again. The corporate-suite client. The neighborhood resident who lives in the property's daily shadow.

Each of those people interfaces with the same physical asset and walks away with a completely different relationship to it. A digital strategy that only optimizes for the season-ticket holder leaves the rest of the network unsupported, which means the asset itself runs less smoothly than it could.

What came out of it

The workshops produced a stakeholder map and a backlog of product opportunities for the digital platform, organized by who the change actually served. The most useful deliverable was the reframe itself: pushing the client's mental model from "fan experience" to "every-person-the-property-touched experience" gave the work a much more honest scope to ship against.