Leading Product Design to Drive Personalisation & Engagement

Stan Entertainment

Defined and delivered a prioritised backlog of 50+ feature enhancements across onboarding, personalisation, and off boarding - cutting onboarding time & boosting user retention.

Overview & Context

Stan, a leading streaming service in Australia, was at a crossroads. With major events like the streaming of the Olympics on the horizon, the company needed to rapidly uplift its product suite to enhance customer experiences—from onboarding and personalisation to off-boarding.

To achieve this, Stan partnered with Deloitte and appointed me to lead a multidisciplinary team to develop a forward-thinking product strategy and a robust backlog of feature enhancements that could propel their service forward despite core designers being tied up with day-to-day operations.

1/4 Challenge & Problem

Stan faced a significant challenge: while they had promising plans for a personalised streaming experience driven by AI, their key design resources were consumed by routine business activities. This bottleneck prevented them from effectively implementing change and refining critical customer journeys. The main obstacles were to streamline the onboarding process, maximise the value of the new media and personal recommendations engine, and enhance the off-boarding experience to drive retention and engagement through and beyond the Olympics.

2/4 My Role & Approach

As the Product Design Lead, I played a pivotal role in steering the initiative towards success by driving strategic oversight, data-driven decision-making, and impactful design delivery:

Strategic Oversight: I initiated a robust project plan that included discovery phases and stakeholder interviews to align the product vision with user needs and business goals. This foundational work set clear objectives and guided the project's direction.
Effective Decision-Making: I facilitated ideation workshops and prioritisation sessions with cross-functional stakeholders, integrating customer insights, market research, and technical constraints.
Impactful Design Delivery: Through a organised sprint cadence, the team maintained momentum and ensured timely delivery of our deliverables. I advocated for ethical design principles by removing dark UX patterns and introducing in-app touch-points to prevent involuntary suspensions, reinforcing trust and satisfaction.

3/4 Process & Execution

Our end-to-end process unfolded across four key stages:

1. Initial Research & Opportunity Identification:

Audited Stan’s existing onboarding, off-boarding, and personalisation features to pinpoint enhancement opportunities.
Conducted competitive benchmarking alongside quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews, surfacing roughly 53 potential feature improvements.

2. Stakeholder Engagement & Prioritisation:

Partnered with business leaders to evaluate and rank features against strategic goals, resulting in a clearly prioritised product backlog.
Aligned insights directly with user needs, technical feasibility, and commercial objectives.

3. Detailed Design & Agile Execution:

Led agile design sprints, iterating on high-priority initiatives and crafting flexible UI components adaptable across devices (mobile, tablet, Apple TV, Chromecast, Samsung TVs, Xbox, etc.).
Integrated planning sessions, daily stand-ups, and design jams to foster collaboration and rapid iteration.
Coordinated closely with engineering teams to balance design ambition with platform constraints, ensuring deliverable-ready solutions.
Conducted iterative user testing to validate designs, refine interactions, and champion accessibility and ethical design choices.

4. Documentation & Handover:

Produced comprehensive functional specifications and annotated design system components that enabled Stan’s internal development team to implement features independently.
Delivered a detailed product backlog and roadmap to guide ongoing enhancements throughout the following year.

4/4 Results & Impact

Under my guidance, the program delivered:

Enhanced Customer Journeys: Redesigned onboarding reduced browsing time and enabled users to engage with content more efficiently, yielding a smoother and more personalised experience.
Strategic Roadmap for Change: The prioritised backlog and functional specs established a strong foundation for continuous product improvements, ensuring Stan stayed competitive during and after the streaming of the Olympics.
BAU Excellence: Stan’s internal teams adopted our documentation approach, agile design methodologies and sprint-based execution, embedding a culture of design-driven delivery into their routines.
Improved Personalisation: Refinements to the personalisation engine delivered more accurate content recommendations, driving higher customer satisfaction and retention metrics throughout critical event periods.

This engagement not only elevated Stan’s product experience but also instilled best practices that continue to shape their design evolution today.

Learnings & Next Steps

This project showed me how aligning early with leadership, combining data with user insight, and designing ethically can position design as a key business driver.

Early alignment with stakeholders, including board sponsors, is vital for proactive risk mitigation and fostering trust in design-led initiatives.
Integrating quantitative metrics and qualitative insights from the outset accelerates decision-making and ensures feature priorities remain user-centric.
Embedding ethical design checks—such as removing dark patterns and validating feedback touchpoints—strengthens user trust and long-term retention.
Fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration between design, engineering, and product leadership drives scalable, platform-agnostic solutions that can be iterated rapidly.