Disney Enterprise XD

I founded the program, and grew a team from 1 to 16 designers, for Disney's Streaming As A Service platform. The Enterprise XD team designed a suite of 30+ industrial grade products that operate Disney+, ESPN+, Hulu, and STAR+. The platform saved Disney $80M per year, and increased MRR 25% YoY.

3. The Products
   1. Commerce
   2. Content
   3. Business Intelligence
   4. Developer Experience
4. The Strategy
5. The Team

To create something truly novel, you need novel tools.

The Products

Commerce Tools

Commerce Orchestration - Codename "Genie"

Putting the right offer in front of the right user at the right time is deceptively complex. Our global scale required 1000+ combinations of content rights, currencies, payment terms, and devices.

Bespoke commerce operations unlocked Disney+'s global expansion from 25M subscribers domestically to 105M net subscribers globally. Features for managing automated price changes grew MRR by 25% YoY.

Design Principles

The design of this product was guided by the principles of "Safety" and "Agility". These principles guided real design tradeoffs between discoverability vs progressive disclosure, or reviews vs completion time.

Support Agent Tools - codename "Baymax"

Disney provides its guests with exceptional care because we believe the brand experience provides long-term commercial value. Be that as it may, customer care can be a significant cost center. How might we deliver personal care at scale?

These custom-built tools for our agents saved Disney $20M/pa in operating expenses by shortening case resolution time, increasing CSAT scores, and giving agents upsell capability.

Lifecycle Messaging

codename Galaxy

A guiding UX principle across Disney+ is to put the right offer in front of the right user at the right time. Creating personalized messages with third-party tools was not possible without violating privacy laws, or prohibitively expensive brittle integrations of multiple apps.

"Galaxy" supported email and push notifications, translated into each language Disney+ supports, populated with unique recommendations for each account.

Content Platform

An Audience of One

The content strategy for most streaming services, including Disney+, is to create an audience of one. Each user experiences a bespoke presentation of content.

Our tactic to achieve this was an "Algotorial" presentation that leveraged the best attributes of human curation and machine learning. Editorial collections were ML optimized, and the display order was optimized with a few human overrides for redacted tactic.

codenames Polaris & Tesseract

A team of editors steeped in knowledge of the Disney catalog created hundreds of content collections around themes, brands, characters. We built a WYSIWYG editor that showed the custom artwork for each title so editors could organize collections in a visually harmonious way. We saw engagement and CVR lift from doing this.

Business Intelligence

Improve the quality of decision making for everyone at Disney.

Streaming Analytics

codename Optumus

The internet is not built for persistent delivery of high bandwidth http packets. Making good on our promise of sterling quality video to consumers on any device in any region required specialized tools that could pro-actively identify issues and notify engineers with actionable insights.

The team used participatory design methods that included the users - delivery engineers - into the design process to ensure the product was usable and useful to real-world use cases.

This product saved Disney $30M/pa over comparable third party products.

Experimentation, A/B Testing, Feature Flagging

codename WeaponX

We built our own experimentation platform with multi-variate testing, sophisticated holdouts, and feature flagging to help Disney make evidence-informed decisions.

Impact

An home-made tool saved us $5M/pa in licensing fees and unlocked MRR growth.

Data Portal

Our data portal centralized insights about subscriber growth, content consumption, and consumer sentiments in one place accessible to cast members across the enterprise.

Developer Experience

Enterprise Design System

We partnered with a 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.

Unified Platform Vision

Evangelizing design system adoption begins with a promise of a better future. We buy on emotion and rationalize with facts (stability and scalability for developers; operational savings and velocity for business owners; usability and brand trust for designers). We designed a vision-state for a platform of feature products with a shared visual language.

Streaming as a Service Strategy

What is worth building?

A global streaming service requires an entire industry of tools in commerce, content, customer experience, data insights, and developer support. Off-the-shelf tools could bootstrap Disney+ part way, but at scale the costs, privacy regulations, and business goals required custom products.

We zeroed in on building products that could directly influence a company-wide KPI.

Net Subs - customer acquisition
MRR - revenue growth
OpEx - cost optimization
RFE - customer engagement (Recency, Frequency, Engagement)

Setting Priority

I was the design executive accountable for investing design in these biggest business outcomes, often with competing priorities. When everything is a priority, nothing is. I used a Growth Framework in collaboration with opportunity estimates from Product and Effort Estimates from engineering, to align Executives and Partners on where to invest our fixed resources.

This model helped in securing funding for staffing, contractors, and roadmap priority. We sequenced our work from the top right to lower left in hiring and project planning.

The Team

Defining Culture

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 Team Charter Workshop.

Operating Model

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.

Aligning our team with these business areas enabled long lived product teams that increased performance over time. It also empowered our designers with ownership and subject matter expertise; this helped develop their influence.