New season, new product: Going behind the scenes of BetMGM’s new sportsbook

The start of new season sport in the US is a critical time in the life of any sportsbook operator, even more so now in today’s crowded market where market share lives and dies on the strength of your product and its reception by users. Since launching in 2018 as a joint venture between MGM Resorts International and Entain, BetMGM has carved out a bronze medal position behind FanDuel and DraftKings, but as any good entrepreneur will tell you, you are only as good as your last product. As part of its new season push, BetMGM recently debuted an upgraded sportsbook app, something which EGR North America discusses with VP of product management Kamal Grey.

EGR North America: What’s been the central ethos behind redesigning the BetMGM sportsbook app?

Kamal Grey (KG): The journey towards redesigning the BetMGM app started during last year’s football season where we implemented a lot of visual and aesthetic changes. The goal there was to modernize the look and feel to make it easy to use – navigation was a core tenet of that redesign – making it easy for customers to find and path their way to the bets they’re interested in. Speed and stability is at the core of everything that we do, and trying to make the product as fast as possible was another core tenet.

This year, we tried to take it to the next level in using two or three themes. One is continuing to enhance our visual design with small elements like the color background on the team logos tied to the team colors, small visuals, and changing the look of our promotions as well. Beyond that, we’re continuing to improve our navigation through the use of metadata, which is best illustrated in the live environment, where stats and everything update in real time.  It’s not great pregame, but we’ve invested a lot of time in trying to make the live experience as engaging as possible. As our customers start to shift towards more and more live betting, this experience is probably where it’s going to manifest itself and then that’s going to play out even through our non-live markets. We’re constantly experimenting with elevating and identifying the best markets as well as the most popular markets that a potential customer would want to bet on, for those who are browsing. Obviously, if you’re a customer who knows exactly what you want, you still have this navigation to path exactly where you want or you can just tap all and peruse every single market that’s available for a specific event.

EGR North America: Have there been any delays or setbacks during the process?

KG This one was probably one of our smoother launches; we did not realise any significant customer-facing issues. Obviously, there are small bugs and things we had to clean up that a customer would not see, but overall, this was probably one of our smoother releases.

EGR North America: Were you working from an established app development and rollout-process map or did a new one app? have to be developed given the length of time between redesigns and time constraints associated with the process?

KG We were doing iterative rollouts throughout the year. Starting from last year, there were smaller releases throughout the year. We have upgrade releases in January, February, March, April, and May leading up to some of these bigger releases, like the changes to our events detail page and some of the metadata changes. Throughout the year, there was obviously some experimentation or beta testing with customers just to ensure that some of our hypotheses were validated before we rolled it in an app out to a wider audience.

EGR North America: Have you retained any elements of the previous iteration in the new design other than the obvious ones such as loading pages etc?

KG The core of the product is really the same as last year, which ultimately serves as a foundation for the product. This redesign was about adding additional capabilities on top of a really good foundation that we established last year. 

EGR North America: Obviously the app utilizes a number of new markets including same-game parlay and exclusive team partner odds. Was it easy to build these elements into the app redesign and if so, how much extra resource was required?

KG: Nothing’s easy, everything takes time and resources, and there was certainly some effort involved in adding the new markets and building out the odds related content. However, there wasn’t really a need for additional resources; we leveraged our existing resources to get us to where we are now.

EGR North America: How important was it to tie the new sportsbook app launch to the new NFL season?

KG: Absolutely critical. Football season is where you see a huge influx of new players coming back because it is the sport that drives a lot of our sportsbook activity, so having your best and brightest product in the market at that time is critical to our product development and our business overall.

EGR North America: How has the app been received by players so far?

KG: I think we’ve made a significant step forward. Not only are our players and our partners recognizing that, but other stakeholders are saying very similar things and aiding our understanding, reassuring us that we’re going in the right direction.

EGR North America: What part did the move towards a single wallet play in the decision to redesign the sportsbook app?

KG: It didn’t really play that much of a part as those processes work in parallel. Obviously, single account was just a core foundational element that we needed going forward. Having a better product in look and feel goes hand in hand with having really easy customer journeys, especially for our biggest customers who go across state lines.

EGR North America: Do you have any similar ambitions to redesign the igaming app?

KG: We’re always looking at improving our product every day. Talking about our aspirations for 2024, I imagine you can look forward to seeing some changes coming to not only the sportsbook product again next year but also the igaming product as well, so watch this space.