Disney Enterprise XD

How might we connect consumers to the stories & characters they love through a streaming service?

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

The Strategy (of Streaming)

To create something truly novel you need novel tools.
-Brian McConnell

Building a global streaming service that meets consumer expectations requires an entire industry of components in commerce, content, support, data insights, and developer tools. Disney's costs at scale & privacy policies required us to build novel solutions.

I was accountable for investing design in the biggest business opportunities of:
customer acquisition - Net Subs
revenue growth - MRR
cost optimization - OpEx
customer engagement - RFE

I used a Growth Framework to prioritize investment in each of these products. This helped in securing funding for staffing, contract, and roadmap priority. We proceeded from the top right to the lower left in sequencing our hiring and projects.

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.

The Products

Commerce Tools

Commerce Orchestration

codename "Genie"

Putting the right offer in front of the right user at the right time is depetively complex. At global scale that means 1000+ combinations of content rights, currency, payment terms, and devices. Running our own commerce stack unlocked Disney+'s global expansion from 25M subscribers domestically to 105M net subscribers globally.

Features for managine automated price changes grew MRR by 25% YoY.

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.

Analytics

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.