Disney StreamEngine
| Role & Responsibility | Team | Timeline | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sr. Director, Product Design Team hiring, management, and organization design. Design strategy. Partner management. Budgeting. Culture development. | 12 FT Designers + 4-6 Design Contractors | Jan 2019 - Aug 2023 | saved $100M p/a in operating costs supported a 2x growth in AARPU |
Streaming Video is Hard
Operating at the scale, and legal exposure, that Disney does often requires us to build, not buy, solutions due to cost or privacy constraints. The scale of this platform was comparable to an entire industry. Many of the products we built matched the scale of commercial products:
| Disney Product | Purpose | Commercial Analog(s) |
|---|---|---|
| Genie | Billing and SKU management | Orb, Metronome |
| Baymax | Customer Support Portal | Zendesk |
| WeaponX | Experimentation & Feature Flagging | Optimizely, Launch Darkly |
| Polaris | Content Curation | Contentful |
| Optumus | Streaming Quality Analysis | Conviva |
| Developer Platform | n/a | |
| DATA Platform | A one-stop shop for all metrics and analytics of our streaming services. | Tableau, Zoho |
| Ad Manager, Mission Control | Advertising curation, provisioning, and deployment. | Google AdSense, Amazon Advertising |
| Partner Portal | GitLabs | |
| Galaxy | Platform for sending personalized targeted messages (Email, SMS, Push) to our users. | salesforce, omnisend, braze |
All of the products we designed or consulted on:
Anti-Piracy Operations, Audience Segmentation, CDN Management Console, Commerce & Offer Operations, Commerce Config Tool, Content Catalog Browser, Content delivery Preview, Content Experience Management, Content Portal (hulu live, sVOD), CX Dashboard , Data Activation Framework , DATA instrumentation library, Data Portal , Developer Portal, Dictionary & Translation, Disney Edge Controller (DEC), EXD Design System, Experimentation , Fraud Management Service, Hulu Ad Manager, Hulu Ad Mission Control, Hulu Ad Revenue Processing Service, Machine Learning Dashboard, Metadata Mapping & Visualization, Partner Portal, Player Config Service, Responder Files (DATA Feature Market), SRE Dashboard, Streaming QoS Insights, Support Agent Console, Unified Messaging Platform
Legacy Of Tool Innovation
Why build custom software tools?
To create something truly novel you need novel tools.
Disney has a rich history of building new tools that unlock creative possibilities. One famous example was the Multi-plane camera which massively accelerated animation and enabled parallax motion techniques.
The Team
A team is greater than the sum of the individuals. It's a singular unit with a shared purpose. The secret ingredient that binds a group of people together is the culture. I'm proud to say the Enterprise XD team at Disney had a strong culture of psychological safety, authenticity, and shared growth.
Culture can be designed with intentional reinforcement of the behaviors that align with our values. Other teams at Disney saw this and asked for an open-source toolkit for our culture workshop.
Pods
To tackle such a large surface area, we organized the team into pods for each topical area. These subjects aligned with business outcomes as well.
Design System
We partnered with an team of engineers who cared deeply about developer productivity to create a design system and a visual language that was unique to disney. This design system provides a high quality, rapid, and robust UI framework across all these products.
