That Cast Member Life: My Second Year at Disney
On June 26th, I reached my 2-year anniversary at Disney! This Streamiversary, or Disney-versy, wasn’t as chaotic as my 1st year with the #TechLayoffs saga but it wasn’t a walk in the park either. And I know that you have to take the good with the bad because things are rarely perfect but as I look back at my 2nd year, it did have its perfect moments. Let’s jump into the good, the bad, and the not-so-ugly, shall we?
This is the 3rd story of a 3-part blog series titled “That Cast Member Life”. Feel free to read my origin story [here](Link to Unintentional Networking: How I Landed My Disney Dream Job} and part 2 [here](Link to That Cast Member Life: My First Year at Disney).
What’s in a Name?
2 years ago, I joined Disney Streaming, bushy tailed and bright eyed, super excited to work on Disney+ and Hulu. Right after the [company wide layoffs last year](Link to That Cast Member Life: My First Year at Disney), the decision was made to merge Disney Streaming and Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution (DMED) teams into a new organization called Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology (DE&ET). Business wise, this totally made sense and so the beginning of my 2nd year at Disney was focused on becoming a new design system team because we were adding 3 DMED system designers to the mix.
Now, other design teams across the DE&ET organization onboarded new folks as well but from my standpoint, design systems not only were growing larger with some amazing designers but also introducing new responsibilities: the News, Entertainment, and Studio brand experiences across mobile apps, web, and tv apps.
The question that was top of mind for me was,
How were we going to support all these brands?
More questions would come to mind as the next few months unfolded as a new team, such as,
Who was going to work on what?
Which really meant,
Am I still going to work on Streaming brands?
and
How do we build & maintain the design system resources in a cohesive way?
This question brought a lot of strong feelings to the surface because obviously prior to the team merge, each systems team was following a philosophy and process that worked for their particular brands. But now as a new team, which way do we go with? Or do we create a hybrid way?
As you can tell, we had more questions than answers but the very first thing we knew would set us up for success is to get everyone together, in-person, to start to build that new team culture.
Forming, Storming, Norming
We were one of the first teams to coordinate an in-person trip to the Glendale office, where we were able to break up into smaller groups and discuss a range of topics, including team structure, component building approaches, & engineering partnerships. All in all it was very productive and left us with a strategy to move forward. Plus, what better way to bond as a new team than a trip to Disneyland!
In the coming months, we would accomplish a lot across as a team as we set ourselves on the path to create a new design system that would be flexible enough to support all the DE&ET brands.
Milestones
Project Launches
I also experienced a few milestones during my 2nd year which still feels surreal. I was able to launch a few projects which I’m super proud of. The first one was during the season 32 premiere of Dancing With the Stars on Disney+. I worked on the badge that shows up when a new episode is airing, including the addition of the lightning bolt icon to designate to viewers that the content was live. I worked with an amazing designer, Jaime Radwan, and Product Manager, Virgil Caval, to accomplish this without much friction.
The second project was when we rolled out Hulu on Disney+. Though a lot of UI stayed the same, the majority of the project that I supported was working on adding information, or metadata, to the variety of UI components that would help viewers decide on which content to watch. This included the hero banners, at the top of the experience, and small card components, that were used everywhere. A lot of Project Hulk (Hulu on Disney+) launched in separate releases, and focused on adding. updated UI to the app, culminating in the inclusion of Star+, our Latin America app, into Disney+, which was aptly called Star+ on Disney+ (SOD).
What’s wild is that this is the first time in my career that I could point to something tangible to my parents and tell them that I worked on that. Yes, I’ve launched projects before that were visible for my parents to see but telling them I helped make the button color change in the Lyft app in 2021 wasn’t necessarily something they cheered for. But being able to see the impact on the product that I wanted to work on, for so long, actually happen, is something else.
UX Summit 2024
Another milestone and bucket list item that I checked off this year was speaking at the internal design conference, UX Summit. This conference brought together UX designers from across The Walt Disney Company for an insightful and inspiring 2-days of design talks and workshops, both in-person and virtually. My team was fortunate enough to present on the main stage and deep dive into our new design system which culminated in announcing our system name, ICON.
The main difference between a lot of the talks and ours was that we didn’t cover anything we’d launched yet because the system was still in-progress. But setting up the context of how our team was internally structured and the approach we were taking from theming, responsive components, and education standpoints was our goal to ensure we were being transparent with our partners and to help generate buzz around the new system.
All-in-all, it was a very fun and memorable experience that I’m happy to add to my 2nd year milestones.
ICON Design Systems
Speaking of the new system, one of the things that excited me in building a new system was the idea that everyone of my team members already had systems experience under their belt. We had a chance to basically have a “do over” to remove the bad bits we didn’t particularly enjoy and add in the bits that made each of our systems successful in the past. Plus, it was a chance to really think through how we could push our systems expertise further and in the words of our Director of Design Systems, Jen Yee,
Do career defining work.
At this point, we established our v0 milestone that includes an ICON component structure and variable theming hierarchy to stress test against a handful of brands which we are currently building out. We’re partnering with brand designers and managers from ESPN Fantasty, Marvel Unlimited, and Hulu to collaborate on building their new brand component libraries which will become the new source of truth for design and engineering, taking advantage of all of Figma’s rich feature set such as variables.
Taking the components that we built in ICON and adapting them simply by updating the color theme and size variable values is pretty impressive, if I do say so myself. But we know that’s just the beginning because we know we’ll encounter bespoke things here and there which offers a feedback loop as a systems team to decide if we should either build that bespoke component or variant on the brand level or level that particular use case back up to the ICON library. In this way, we hope to enhance ICON as we build out these brand libraries and make them more useable for our brand design partners.
On to Year 3!
With our roadmap set for the near term, I’m really excited to continue building our brand libraries for all the DE&ET brands as well as support the super talented Hulk and SOD product launch teams as we gear up to launch Sports on Disney+ at the end of the year. Though it was not a perfect 2nd year, it did have its perfect glimpses across the projects I worked on and it would be a lie to say I wasn’t enjoying it all. Whatever the future holds, I’m hoping to go with the flow and fall back into what I love the most about design systems, the nitty gritty pixel pushing and variable strategization as well as the close collaboration with brand designers and engineering partners.
Stay tuned as I continue my story, since I’ve written 3 parts to my Disney journey story already, might as well continue it, right? Bets on how Year 3 will go?
Jeremy is a Bay Area native who loves all things design systems. He took the “long way round” into design, taking educational stops in the manufacturing and printing industries. These experiences give Jeremy a unique perspective on design and he relishes in giving back to the design community in any way he can.
