Director of Product Design · 2019 — 2022
Warner Bros. Discovery
Live Sports at Global Scale
The Challenge
Live sports streaming is unforgiving. When a goal is scored, millions of people are watching simultaneously. The player can't buffer. The timeline can't lag. The experience has to be flawless at the exact moment it matters most. I led design across TNT Sports, Discovery+, HBO Max, and Eurosport — products serving global audiences for Premier League, UEFA Champions League, MotoGP, UFC, and more.
The Approach
Redesigned the video player experience for live sports — not just playback controls, but the entire lean-back and lean-forward experience. Interactive timelines that let viewers scrub through key moments. Picture-in-picture for multi-match viewing. Stats overlays that didn't compete with the broadcast.
Built a content discovery system that handled the unique challenges of live sports: events that exist in the future, are happening now, and just ended all need different UI treatments. A match starting in 2 hours looks different than one that's live right now, which looks different than one with highlights available.
Designed for global scale — the same product serving Premier League fans in the UK, MotoGP fans in Spain, and UFC fans in the US. Localization wasn't just language — it was understanding how different audiences consume sports differently.
Worked closely with engineering to ensure design decisions were technically viable at scale. Every interaction had to perform under extreme concurrent load. This wasn't a place for ambitious animations that could cause frame drops.
Designing for the Moment
Sports streaming is fundamentally different from entertainment streaming. Netflix can buffer for 3 seconds and nobody notices. During a penalty shootout, 3 seconds of buffering is catastrophic. Every design decision was filtered through this reality — we optimized for performance first, polish second. Lightweight UI components, minimal DOM complexity, hardware-accelerated animations only. The design had to be beautiful, but it had to be fast above all else.
The Multi-Screen Problem
Sports fans don't watch one thing at a time. They want the main match full screen, a second match in picture-in-picture, a live stats panel on their phone, and a social feed on their laptop. We designed for this reality — a system of connected experiences that let viewers control their attention without missing anything. The key insight was that the TV is the primary screen, but the phone is the control surface.
Outcomes
Video player experience serving millions of concurrent viewers
Live sports discovery system across multiple global platforms
Design system shared across Discovery+, HBO Max, and Eurosport
Interactive timeline and key moments navigation for live events
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