Role: Product Designer

The Project

Paramount (formerly CBS Viacom) is expanding their Paramount+ streaming service globally and required expertise in performance and localisation.

Paramount have an exisiting US domestic TV streaming product with their own teams for designing and developing features, but have sort out other experts to help take on their global rollout to many markets. Performance on low-end devices was a concern as well as localisation differences between regions.

How I Contributed

Contributing to Voyager Design System

Working on the Paramount+ product there were many changes and enhancements required for an international version of the product. The US domestic app did not support extended language keyboard characters, date formats, classification and rating compliance and language options. I supported the Paramount+ product design team with these new component variants to ensure the product met international requirements. I also have guided the team on performance concerns for low-end devices and ways of designing to cater for such devices.

A bridge between product design, engineering and project managers

I often worked closely with business analysts to ensure proper documentation and acceptance criteria for new features were complemented with Figma designs. The handoff notes were to ensure anyone on the team was able to digest the feature in written and visual form.

The Biggest Challenge

Policy and procedure: Numerous approvals and an ever growing list of stakeholders and product owners

With a company as large as Paramount there were many set in stone procedures of how projects we worked on and features design, approved and implemented. There were many departments to make the whole product work from marketing to backend team to content creation and central product design. Building a case for improvements and changes required many stages of approvals to move through the system, often with push-back if was not able to be implemented universally. I learnt which Paramount team members I could work with to gain insights and support to progress feature improvements.