Discovery
Senior product manager for connected TV devices across discovery+, international expansion and TVE apps.
Discovery’s top priority as a company for 2020 was their streaming service called discovery+, but due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we were forced to leave our offices and work from the safety of our homes. Leadership was forced to innovate and created the company’s first exchange program known as “Project Thunder”, borrowing top Product and Design talent from all corners of the company to create and launch discovery+, and I was nominated and pulled over from Golf Digest. I was asked to lead the unification of the 18 ATVE (aggregated TV everywhere) apps like Animal Planet, TLC, Food Network, etc. In addition, I was tasked with platform product ownership of the discovery+ CTV flagship app development and support mobile apps from concept to launch, and international expansion.
Shortly after starting my new role, I started redefining processes, optimizing and creating efficiencies across the teams and ways of working. We were only given nine months to design, develop and launch the discovery+ product across platforms domestically. I also escalated the need for a substantial Product/Design and UX QA program and was given full autonomy to stand up and lead it. This was a key part of helping the team move quickly and have autonomy, while tracking functional blockers and design polish items.
Product Lead for Home and Browse Pages
Amazon - Fire Tablet Support
When discovery+ launched, customers #1 complaint on Amazon Fire TV was a lack of support of Fire Tablet, which made up a negligible % of users on our other products. To meet customers where they are, I took a dev lead and QA lead, and served as tech product, project manager and QA. I worked across ad tech (Amazon rather than Google), video player team, analytics, IAP, etc. Pushing this through, with similar sentiments from other team members and stakeholders, it was the most efficient and easiest project we’ve done. Increased our ratings on FireTV by ~8% , and ratings on Fire Tablet came in strong at 4.7 stars out of 5, one of our main KPIs. This project took under a month to complete, increased revenue based on additional subscriptions and video viewing, and increased engagement with the addition of new device support.
FireTV - Live Channels
Amazon Discovery fans on FireTV have the ability to watch live TV from their FireTV home screen, mimicking the traditional cable experience. Over 10% of discovery+ customers were watching on FireTV, and over 20% of minutes watched. This new feature had goals of increasing customer retention, strengthening our partnership with Amazon, expanding our presence on the Amazon Appstore, promoting live channels and decreasing the amount of clicks and time to enter app and watch content. This growth, engagement and retention play led to an increase in all of the above, as we grew the FireTV audience by 2%, engagement by 4% and retention by 1% over time.
Product/Design QA Program
Define how the organization would capture visual and experience defects
Establish QA workflows between Product, Design, and Engineering
Ensure UI, UX, and content parity across all platforms
Bring a new streaming service to market with a world-class experience
Release largest-ever content library with 2,500+ shows and 55,000+ episodes
Accomplishments and Responsibilities:
Created training documentation including principles and best practices for QA, checklists for smoke testing builds, and guidelines for capturing defect tickets
1500+ customer-facing product and design issues identified and resolved, half of bugs found
Organized staff into platform-based squads with defined roles and responsibilities
Optimized team into squads ways of working for rituals and workflows; Conducted training sessions across all squads
Led group QA sessions to reach UI, UX, and content parity across all platforms
Served as UX/UI testing lead across FireTV/AndroidTV, tvOS, iOS, Android and Web, supported on Roku and HWA (Xbox and Samsung)
Reported to leadership and stakeholders on progress
Results:
discovery+ scaled to over 25M paying subscribers in 11 countries and 13 languages in under two years
Discovery leadership leveraged the success of discovery+ to acquire Warner Media (HBO, CNN, etc) in the largest media merger in the last 20 years and created Warner Bros. Discovery
Aggregated TV Everywhere (ATVE)
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Discovery’s ATVE product is a direct-to-consumer streaming service that allows customers to link their TV provider, pair their devices and watch favorite shows by streaming or watching live. This includes both free to watch content, as well as subscription only content.
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As the platform product owner for CTV, I implemented on a new vision for these properties by building a new product and migrating the existing bifurcated properties into one across the 18 networks including Animal Planet, HGTV, Food Network, etc. This also allowed customers to access more content across properties through one product.