Viacom Global Events Platform

From 2017-2018, I was the product owner of Viacom’s Global Events platform, which is the driving force behind events such as MTV’s Video Music Awards (VMAs), the Movie & TV Awards, CMT Awards, Logo Trailblazers and VH1’s Hip Hop Honors.

My team worked in two streams: one focused core platform improvements, and the other was dedicated to onboarding the Europe Music Awards onto what was originally a US-only platform.

Some of the things I explored:

  • - User research to get to the root of WHY people watch award shows.
  • - Developing user personas and accommodating the needs of people who watch award shows for different reasons, e.g. the music fan, the gossip-monger, and the fashionista.
  • - Streamlining production workflows so that our content editors could be the first to comment on their own events, putting them in a better position to compete with Twitter.
  • - Internationalizing the US-focused platform to reduce pressure on international content editors, e.g. they no longer had to write up translations for each of the 19 different languages they needed to support, every single time they create a CTA button.
  • - Increasing usability so that users would not have to spend much time learning a new UI during a live event.

What I worked on:

  • User research (interviews, card sorting, contextual inquiry, affinity clustering, problem statements)
  • Persona development
  • User journeys and schematic diagrams
  • Prototyping and user testing
  • Product management
  • Writing stories
  • User acceptance testing
  • Stakeholder management
  • Internationalization
  • Production workflows

Tools:

  • Sketch
  • Invision
  • Zeplin
  • JIRA