CASE STUDY / XG PREDICTOR
xG Predictor: Engineering around match deadlines
Football-data synchronisation, round administration, prediction exports and time-sensitive insurer notifications with an operational fallback.
BLUESPACE STUDIO / SOFTWARE ENGINEERINGWhat needed to work.
A football prediction product needed external match data, prediction exports and insurer updates coordinated around a selected match.
The delivery.
Football-data synchronisation, round administration, prediction exports, insurer notifications and an outbox with bounded attempts.
The work around the prediction game
A football prediction product has work that takes place outside the interface: fixtures must be available, rounds must be administered, predictions must be exportable and certain notifications must happen at the right moment.
For xG Predictor, that included information sent to an insurer around a nominated fixture. Timing mattered. A successful email request by itself was not the whole operational requirement.
What we implemented
The codebase includes football-data synchronisation, round administration, prediction exports and a sequence of insurer notifications associated with a round.
The workflow prepares round-specific notifications and tracks attempts through an outbox, allowing operators to distinguish the message from the delivery attempt.
That structure provides a record to inspect and helps distinguish preparing a message from attempting its delivery. It does not, by itself, establish an inbox-delivery rate.
Designing for a missed notification
A deadline-sensitive task needs an operator’s fallback. During rollout, the discussion covered the case where the expected insurer email did not arrive in the operating window.
The agreed manual route was to download the predictions export from the round administration page and send the attachment. Monitoring continued as part of the rollout.
This is a practical lesson from the work: automation can reduce repeated actions, but someone still needs a way to detect and recover from exceptions.
Delivered scope
- External football-data processing and round administration.
- Prediction exports needed by the operational workflow.
- Round-specific insurer notification preparation and sending.
- An email outbox with attempt and expiry controls.
- Access to a manual export/send fallback.
During the October 2026 rollout the team confirmed an automated predictions email and continued monitoring data issues. The manual export remained an important part of the operating plan.
Have an operation tied to a deadline?
Start with the trigger, the data, the expected confirmation and who takes over when something fails. The same questions apply beyond sports products.
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