Max Launch (2023)
I led the team that was responsible for My List, Continue Watching, and Downloads as we embarked on a tightly-deadlined major redesign of our streaming apps to support the newly merged Warner Bros. Discovery. It was a time of major disruption that required me to build new relationships with our Discovery counterparts and maintain morale while requirements, technical capabilities, and org structure were all fuzzy at best. In the end I am incredibly proud of the work we did, all while coming in ahead of deadline, and in a few cases pivoting quickly to support our launch timeline.
Project in a Nutshell
My Role:
Product Design Manager: I worked with product to define the vision and nail down requirements, engineering leads to assess viability of solutions, and with my team to remain sane amidst a time of organizational turbulence. There was a lot of sensitivity around the WarnerMedia+Discovery merger, so we weren’t allowed to start organizing until we got a greenlight from the DOJ. This meant that the second we were cleared, we needed to hit the ground running to launch the new app. This meant that I needed to wear many hats, including stepping in to write some of the initial requirements around our features and starting to sprint ahead on early designs. In the end, we completely designed and spec’ed (interaction design, visual design, a11y, and motion design) My List, Continue Watching, My Stuff, and Downloads for web, mobile, and CTV platforms in under 6 months.
Most Fun:
The energizing chaos. We were moving so fast that there wasn’t really time to worry, which was good, since what we were undertaking was crazy at the best of times, which given the fact we were a newly merged org, was not where we were. Also, being able to dig into a trove of user research from Discovery+! It is a rare treat to get a full library of new research from a former competitor and we learned a lot of new information and received additional confirmation of things we had heard before.
Biggest Challenge:
Forming teams while trying to meet deadlines. There weren’t yet any established teams, so there was often a lot of work just to find out who owned what in other groups.
What I’d Do Differently:
I would have taken my team out to lunch more often, they deserved it.
Formation
The earliest days of the merger were an interesting time. Of who, what, when, where, and why, only “when” seemed to be fully defined. The executives had announced a highly ambitious launch date almost out of the gate, so we needed to quickly figure things out before we had clarity around things like org structure, tech stack, roles and responsibilities, brand colors, or even a name for the eventual product. I took the initiative to kick off product comparisons of the two existing products (HBO Max, Discovery+) for my feature areas, explored a cornucopia of new research from Discovery+, captured the complex logic for Continue Watching in a proto-requirements doc, and kicked off wireframing to ensure we had things in order in time for engineering to pick things up and start working.
We developed our initial wireframes by taking the best from both products, in the hopes of not just meeting existing users' expectations, but by exceeding the experience of both products.
Close inspection of how the two products worked was an important first step in our design process. This was especially important for downloads, which has a complex suite of states and technical requirements.
An exciting improvement we explored for My Stuff was long-press interactions on CTV. We wanted to give users an in-situ tool for managing their My List and Continue Watching items.
We were under a time crunch, but we wanted to make sure we were thorough in our explorations, so we had many iterations of most of our screens.
Delivery
Given the tight timelines, we needed to sprint ahead with our designs even as we were figuring out the exact requirements. In order to minimize disruption to our largest user base on HBO Max, we used the existing HBO Max as a starting point, while also looking for incremental improvements where possible. The timeline also meant that it was an all hands on deck situation where the three of us jumped into the designs for all of our feature areas. We started with wireframes of each feature area to clarify requirements with Product and kick off viability discussion with engineering and quickly led to specs as answers and certainty arrived. This way of working led to many moments of revision, yet ultimately allowed us to arrive at clarity quickly and have specs ready for delivery.
One of the biggest improvements we were able to introduce in the new product was the long-press action. This enabled users to add or remove items to their My List from anywhere, decreasing the need to leave the browse flow to manage their lists. The interaction itself is, if I may say, also genuinely delightful and clear.
Each feature area, involved a lot of documentation. We captured redlines, interactions, motion, and accessibility to support a full-fleshed out experience for our users. I worked directly on specs while also reviewing and helping the designers on my team complete theirs.
The downloads spec, in particular, had a lot of complexity since there are so many levels and nuances to it. There are many different download states and levels and also a separate experience for when the user is offline.
Our designs adhered to our Slate design system, while also requiring us to sprint a bit ahead to meet the specific needs of our features. The download tile itself was not built yet, so we needed to build the components that eventually found their way into the central library.
Launch
In May 2023, roughly 8 months after beginning work on the new service, we launched a combined service in the United States, including all of our work on My List, Continue Watching, and Downloads. Despite a lot of last minute adjustments to scope and technical capabilities, we launched a product we were all very proud of. We had kept the quality bar high and even made some meaningful improvements including the long-press list management and greatly improved download speed and reliability. I was immensely proud of how our team rolled with things all the uncertainty and delivered at a frenetic pace to a very high quality bar.