OPTIMIZE MIND
PERFORMANCE
Delivering a habit-forming mental strength training experience that is adaptive, supportive, and personalised to the unique needs of both professional and casual athletes.
Overview:Optimize Mind Performance (OMP) is a mental strength training platform designed to help sports psychologists build and manage tailored programs for their clients. Already partnered with several leading universities and schools across the U.S., the company is currently entering its second round of investment proposals. The platform includes a dedicated athlete app for completing exercises and tasks, alongside a psychologist hub that offers full control and oversight of programs and plans.Task:
- Outline a strategic roadmap for developing a direct-to-consumer mental strength training tool tailored to everyday athletes.
- Deliver supporting evidence for the roadmap to help strengthen future investment opportunities.
Business benefit: Unlock new revenue streams for OMP through a self-service mental strength training app, while increasing platform usage and engagement frequency.
Customer benefit: Develop a mental strength training tool for both professional and casual athletes that is educational, supportive, and adaptive to individual needs.
Problem:Mental strength training is often seen as a remedy rather than a routine—something athletes turn to only when facing performance issues or mental hurdles. This reactive mindset overlooks the value of consistent, proactive training to maintain and enhance mental wellbeing and performance.
Mobile Application
Sector:
Sports Psychology
Role: Strategy, Competitor & Comparative Analysis, Synthesis, Ideation & Workshopping, Low & Hi-fidelity Wireframing, Prototyping, Concept Testing
Time: 8 Weeks
Time:https://optimizemindperformance.com/
Problem Statement
Professional and casual athletes lack a self-service, direct-to-consumer solution that enables them to consistently maintain and build mental strength as part of their regular training routine.
Professional and casual athletes lack a self-service, direct-to-consumer solution that enables them to consistently maintain and build mental strength as part of their regular training routine.
Defining A Clear Hypotheses and Roadmap
Before beginning discovery, it was essential to align the team around the ultimate goals—proving that engagement was the right strategic direction and defining an evidence-backed roadmap manifesto. This would set clear, incremental goals for product releases while also informing team structure and resource planning in line with OMP’s financial capabilities.
Increasing athlete engagement will result in improvement of not just mental performance, but also impact their overall performance & outcomes.
Our Next Goal
An insight-led roadmap designed to align the team on how to drive self-motivated engagement within the app, while equipping them with the data and learnings needed to make confident decisions and build a continuously evolving, user-informed product.
Research: Comp Analysis
We conducted a thorough competitive and comparative analysis to validate product approaches to mental strength training (MST) and performance, while identifying opportunities to support self-directed and continuous MST. Here are some key insights that was uncovered.
Research: Qualitative Findings
We conducted in-depth qualitative research with the internal OMP team to validate existing knowledge, as well as with semi-professional athletes across various sports and age groups. This helped identify key insights, reinforcing prior knowledge and validating early hypotheses around the need for support, personalisation, and versatility in sustaining ongoing mental strength training.
Personas & Mindsets
Following our discovery phase, we developed five detailed user mindsets to help prioritise and guide ideation. These archetypes also informed product roadmapping by highlighting the most viable audiences for early adoption and sustained engagement—such as the Resilience Advocate.
HMW’s: Relational Goals
Our HMWs focused on two key questions: Does consistent product engagement lead to improved performance—and is that engagement sustainable? And what does an athlete need to seamlessly integrate mental strength training into their daily routine, regardless of their condition? These guiding questions kept us aligned with both business objectives and user needs.Focus: Business
How might we ensure we develop a platform that provides ongoing, and sustained organic engagement beyond practitioner involvement?
HMW #2 Focus: Athletes
How might we create a supportive and personalised experience that empowers athletes to make daily mental strength training an essential—yet easily adaptable—part of their ongoing training and game-day routines?
Ideation: Themes & Arcs
Insights from the discovery phase guided our ideation, with a focus on key themes and user mindsets essential to creating a self-directed mental strength training experience for athletes. Concepts were shaped around core pain points—such as maintaining focus during busy schedules, staying mentally strong through injury, and building effective pre-game rituals.
A Self-Directed MST Experience
Our final recommendation prioritised on value, effort, user retention, and alignment with brand values. We proposed delivering immediate and sustained value through features such as habit-building routine builders, personalised support plans, progress tracking, and light-touch gamification. Together, these elements aim to strike the right balance between motivation and meaningful support—encouraging consistency without trivialising the depth and seriousness of each user’s mental strength journey.Delivery:
Product Bible
At the project’s completion, we delivered a comprehensive product bible that brought together strategy, research, design, and planning frameworks in a single, cohesive reference. While not intended to be prescriptive, it acted as a guiding manifesto—supporting future sprint planning, team alignment, and the transition of the OMP app from a B2B offering to a self-directed, consumer-facing mental strength training experience.The OMP team left inspired and eager to move into development, energised by the clarity of our recommendations. But it was clear to all that this was a shared achievement—driven by close collaboration between the design team and client throughout the process.