PlayStation Design Delivery App
Role: Product Design Manager
Led a team of 3 designers and 1 content strategist/operations specialist that conducted continuous research, defined the product strategy, and collaboratively produced product design and development. Also helped periodically hands on to produce detailed interaction designs for key features.
This application was considered to be on PS5’s critical path for success. I joined the team to help turn around a challenged product and team environment. From there I helped restore the team environment (between product, design, and engineering), establish the product design process, redefined the feature priorities needed for that moment in time, and reposition team members to aspects of features they would excel.
Business Opportunity
Streamline the entire end-to-end product design process to securly deliver PS5 to the world. Provide the optimal application for Product, Design, Eng, QA, Copy, Research, and L10n to collaborate effectively. Support the advanced workflow for copy and localization teams in context of the design.
Solution
The team conducted in-depth observational workflow analysis to define priority of applications to support across organizations. From the in-depth research we defined the roadmap, strategy, and how to approach feature incrementally to deliver continuous value. The key features supported teams to deliver PS5, transformed a failing copy process through technical and user experience solutions, and set the tool up for success to be a competitive market-leading product (in relation to other SAAS competitors - InVision, Abstract, etc).
In addition, the team also developed, instructed, and led organizational change processes related to the organization and delivery of design and copy content for PS5 and beyond. These key operations made certain that we navigated complex situations to make sure each PS5 milestone was met gracefully and with clarity (e.g. how to document and version design and copy deltas for over-the-air vs. firmware updates) and were conducted with direct collaboration with many groups (engineering, copy, localization, qa, program management, product, etc).
We released features to support the needs of each PS5 milestone, starting 2+ years prior to launch. With each major feature we ran initial research, created the product strategy, prototyped and tested concepts, and created the final design.
A few of the features we delivered:
Copy edit in context of design - copy IDs tracked and managed in each design revision and matched against a database.
Inspect Mode
Easy Revisions and Release navigation of design iterations
Watch Design / Notify on Revision Change
Change-log History Viewer
Commenting and collaboration features including tracking resolved/unresolved comments
Cost estimator for localization to guide in economical handoff points
Dashboard for copywriters to see what designs have changed and need their attention
Sketch plugin string management for Designers
And many more...
Inspect Mode for Dev Handoffs. This inspect mode also has special connection to the designer’s design system library toolkit.
Special Credits
Product Design
Parsa Shirazi, Carlton Devereaux, Tiffany Chang
Content Strategy/Operations
Isaiah Webb
Product Management
Dominic Grazian & Paulina Mashnik-Myung
Program Management
Masahiro Kobayashi
Engineering
Mohan Gupta, Anjani Bajaj, Jonathan Kvicky,
Alan Voong, Vince Vuong, Madhu Konda,
Padma Yeddanapudi, Kelvin Chan
Engineering Management
Mohan Gupta