Designated Trainer
Reduced churn and saved $4.5M revenue by introducing a new user role and supporting flows.
Context
Affiliate fees (money gyms pay to CrossFit to use the brand) make up 50% of CrossFit Revenue.
In 2024 CrossFit introduced a requirement for all gym owners to hold a Level 2 CrossFit Certificate.
25.4% of gyms were at risk of churn in 2025.
55% of these gyms had a L2 trainer on staff
Business Goals:
↑ gym retention / ↓ churn
Hypothesis
How might we improve the process to designate a (non-owner) trainer to meet the new requirement?
Understanding the System
Before designing anything, I needed to map the full picture. Through stakeholder interviews and a thorough audit of existing flows, I uncovered a web of interdependencies — multiple actor types (gym owners, trainers, and CrossFit itself), strict eligibility rules, and legal constraints around licensing agreements that couldn't be ignored.
Working closely with product, engineering, and stakeholders, I identified the edge cases that would make or break the experience: what happens when a trainer leaves? What if no eligible trainer exists? Getting clarity on these scenarios upfront was what made it possible to design a flow that was both legally sound and actually usable.
UX Improvements
With the system mapped, I designed a net-new flow from scratch — one that needed to feel simple for gym owners despite the complexity underneath. The key insight was that friction in the existing process (chasing down DocuSign agreements, navigating separate tools) was the real churn driver, not the policy change itself.
By bringing license agreement acceptance directly into the Affiliate Toolkit and surfacing the trainer designation workflow where owners already spent their time, we eliminated the back-and-forth entirely. The result was a flow that 50% of non-at-risk gyms adopted voluntarily — a strong signal that it solved a pain point well beyond the immediate compliance problem.
Enable a user to accept an updated license agreement directly inside the ATK without going through a separate Docusign/email workflow.
Easy access to existing workflow to add a new trainer to the Toolkit
Quickly assign a trainer to the role of Designated Trainer
Prototype
Final prototype showing the end-to-end designation flow
Results
16.4% Gyms Saved
16.4% of at-risk gyms used the DT Option
$4.5M Revenue Saved
Meaningful for CrossFit's bottom-line
77% Customer Satisfaction
Customers love the feature
50% Not at-risk Gyms Used
50% of not-at-risk gyms used the feature too!