Disney+ Growth Design

The story of building Growth Design - the team, process, and product - to launch Disney+ from 0 to 105M subscribers in two years.

Role	Responsibilities	Team	Timeline
Senior Director, Product Design	Design Strategy, Hiring & Management, Organizational Design, Stakeholder Management	7 Product Designers 2 Researchers 4 Design Specialists	Dec 2018 - Dec 2020

Note: This is a long and unconventional case study. For quick reference, you can jump to project context, team leadership, design principles, launch UI, expansion UI

Building Disney+ was an adventure. Adventures rarely follow a straight line of progress so I've included just a few of the most interesting UX challenges we faced in the multi-year saga of launching Disney+.

Chapter 1: Basecamp

The Strategy

By 2017 Disney recognized declining revenue from legacy distribution channels: theatrical, cable, DVD, and licensing. At the same time, the business model for The Walt Disney Company is different from their competitors thanks to a diverse set of revenue streams. Establishing a direct relationship with consumers could be used to drive the flywheel for other lines of business.

Strategic Policy

The internally stated goal for Disney+ was to acquire as many subscribers as possible. Profitability was a distant goal on the horizon. We used these tactics to succeed:

Broad Distribution
Make Disney+ available on every device that could stream video, with a purchase flow that was native to those devices.
Wide Availability
Roll out Disney+ globally with a signup experience that complied with cultural, legal, and fiscal norms in each region.
Affordable Pricing
The $5.99 price at launch was far below competitors.

Growth Origin Story

The Growth Design team began work long before Disney+ launched; before Disney acquired BAMTech for its ability to build content businesses: streaming, commerce, and marketing. Most of the team had already launched & operated dozens of direct-to-consumer services as part of MLB Advanced Media.

placebolder image: logo cluster of streaming services we'd launched

18 months before Disney+ we designed & built Disney's first direct-to-consumer offering in ESPN+. That project deserves its own case study, but I want to call out that much of the foundation for Signup, Payment, Login, and Subscription Management was established in the ESPN+ launch. The core of the Growth Design team carried over from that project.

Signup on Web, direct payment, anonymous users

The Mountain of Scope

The complete scope of surface areas for Disney+ Growth can be organized around several vectors. This intersectionality means each feature might have 9 variations of interaction design.

Features x Devices x Payment Terms

Box Office	Turnstiles	Concession Stand	Closing Credits	Theater Amenities
Non-subscriber Browsing	Sign-Up	Onboarding	Cancellations	Mobile Phones & Tablets
Landing Pages	Log In	Account Management	Re-subscribes	Web
Plan Selection	Activations	Profile Management		Game Consoles
Partnerships & Offers	Account Healing	Subscription Management		Smart TVs
	Payment	Ledgers & Billing		TV Set Top Boxes
	Redemption	Upsells (PPV, Premier Access)
	Gifting

Assembling The Team

Situation & Challenge

At the inception of work on Disney+ the "Growth" design team was 3 designers + 1 UX researcher. We worked well with engineers and product owners needed to grow the team in breadth and depth. Growth Team in 2018 Growth Team - January 2019

Solution

I tackled this scale problem with my peer Directors and VP of Product, and later Data, and Marketing. We aimed for a modular structure, that could grow, while still providing clear swimlanes, accountability, and autonomy.

We considered functional and matrix designs, before agreeing to organize around KPIs that each group of people could chase after. This also roughly correlated to the user journey. We called these "Pods":

Pod	KPIs
Acquisition	Sign Up CTR, Log In CTR
Conversion	Accounts Created, Purchases Completed, Upsells to Higher Tiers
Expansion	Accounts Created, Purchases Completed, Partnerships

Pods
Example Pod

Each pod had the autonomy to self-organize around their tactics and processes needed to deliver against the KPIs. They mostly found a 2 week cadence of ceremonies to stay in sync, prioritize work, flatten issues, and break out working groups.

Pods

Outcomes

Over the 18 months from inception until Launch, I grew the Growth team to 1 Design Manager, 1 Principal Designer, 5 product designers, 2 researchers, and 1 program manager. We also had specialists embedded in the growth team from our Motion Studio, Prototyping, Design Systems, and International UX teams.

I was able to mentor two new designer leaders into positions leading their own teams, with autonomy to deliver against clear KPIs.

Growth Team in December 2020

Experience Tenets

(aka Principles or Axioms)

The use of tenets, axioms, or principles improves the quality of design decisions on complex projects, so we established them for Disney+ as well. I wish I could say we wrote these with intent, early in the project, but in practice, they emerged organically as we took each step up the mountain.

Writing these with our cross-functional team made these real living ideas that you would hear people say while collaborating.

First Stream, First
Disney, Aged Up
Subscribers, Then Revenue
Disney Hospitality

1. "First Stream, First"

This was the most important tenet that we aligned with company leadership very quickly. We wanted to make the signup process as effortless as possible – easier than others that guests had used – so we could escort them to their first stream as quickly as possible. We believed having previously known content gave us an advantage we could leverage with less up-front work from the user.

Remove all unnecessary fields.
Minimize and humanize legal language.
Defer all onboarding features.

While this may all sound obvious, it wasn't how many of our competitors were operating in 2018. It was also not how Disney had operated and required significant stakeholder education, reinforced by our 3rd tenet.

2. "Disney... Aged up"

"Aged up" was a phrase that everyone on the design team used on a nearly daily basis. It was a shorthand for explaining that the design needed to be as premium & modern, as it was magical. The dark color palette, modern san-serif type, and restrained graphics exist in service of this tenet.

Disney had already been on a long and steady brand transformation to appeal to all ages, especially adults without kids. It's not just for families. The acquisition of Lucasfilm, StarWars, and Fox are examples of the new content strategy, as is a forthcoming redesign of EPCOT at Walt Disney World.

3. "Subscribers, Then Revenue"

The goal of Disney+ was to deepen our guests' relationship with the stories & characters they love, not to optimize short-term revenue. We accept as an article of faith that this approach maximizes revenue in the long term.

We targeted several business metrics with the design: CVR, LTV, and AARPU. The commitment we made to shareholders for the first two years of operation was a singular KPI:

net subscribers.

Spoiler: this would change six months after the launch.

4. "Disney Hospitality"

No dark or deceptive patterns.
Disney goes above and beyond legal requirements.
The Disney Voice is friendly, direct, and accessible - even for legal contracts.
Practice unreasonable hospitality.

Chapter 2: Ascent

Landing Page

The biggest challenge for any growth designer is communicating value. Growth Design has two big variables we can influence: motivation and friction.

Growth = Motivation / Friction

We can increase motivation by presenting the value proposition in a way that resonates with people; assuming you understand your users' needs and the product can meet them. We can reduce friction by removing effort for the user, simplifying language, and automating chores. The front page is one of the biggest levers for growth because it is a bigger canvas for communicating value that can increase motivation.

The homepage evolved from early 2018 until mid-2021 starting as an FPO stimulus for research teams (marketing and UXR), and evolving into an optimized proven product with shared ownership between Marketing and Product. Some changes to call out:

The tagline shorted as we learned what features and values resonated with consumers. Eventually, awareness reached a point where we didn't need any tagline.
The artwork grew more complex over time. We always knew that people needed validation of Disney+'s value proposition by seeing the content they'd get, but operationally we needed to evolve to keep the titles fresh and localized.
The call to action coalesced around the bundle as we learned about its value to consumers, and to the business.

Situation

Prior to launching Disney+, Disney had a large cohort of user accounts through websites, storefronts, and fan clubs. We estimated it could be 20% of our users in the first year.

The primary objective of Disney+ is to enrich and deepen the bond between guests and the stories & characters they love. Maintaining a direct-to-consumer relationship where we know who the user is and can track their interactions across all of Disney. A single identity system would open up even more magical experiences down the roadmap.

Challenge

The streaming engineering teams wanted to operate a sovereign identity system for Disney+ users rather than using existing Disney identity systems. Their rationale was that SOLID architecture principles were needed so the system could scale to launch demand (spoiler: this decision was vindicated in the first 12 hours after launch).

Maintaining two identity systems could provide a clumsy UX for existing subscribers. It also undermined an important D2C goal of aggregating more information about our users. We made an effort to design an interaction flow that would be seamless regardless of the user type.

We wanted to ensure this segmentation was invisible to users, and that both kinds of users had as few steps to complete signup as possible.