IGN

Bringing Product Thinking to A MEdia company

Role — Head of Product and Design

After landing this role, and telling my friends in tech about my plans to return to IGN, they mostly had the same question — What the heck is IGN’s Product? My answer was: we’re going to find out!

As the Head of Product and Design at IGN, I embarked on a mission to uncover IGN's true product essence. In my first year, I led the development of our product vision, annual strategy, and implemented OKRs across the Product and Engineering teams. Simultaneously, I revitalized our Product Management and Design departments, assembling an exceptional and diverse team. Together, we fostered a culture of empowered product thinking, driving IGN's transformation in the gaming media industry.

IGN’s Product Vision:

help people enjoy more games, movies, and shows, and share their experiences in fun, and inclusive ways.

In my eyes enjoying more means focusing on two key themes:

  • Accessibility — Making people feel welcome, reducing “gatekeeping” helping people afford their hobby, connecting with others, and making engaging with games and movies simple and easy.

  • Enrichment – providing tools and services for people to go deeper with experiences by connecting with others and making their hobby fit into their lives more easily.

Product Portfolio

Here’s a 10,000 ft view of what products we are managing and have:

  • IGN.com — Our website that contains a wide array of content and experiences from the past 25 years of covering games and entertainment

  • Core App — Our core app is designed to be a streamlined, simple way to enjoy the industry-leading editorial stories and videos created by our editors

  • Guides — Game help and walkthroughs are core to helping gamers in moments push past frustration, or optimize the time they spend with their games.

  • Subscription — IGN Prime is our subscription program that enables a number of quality of life and additional features across IGN’s products for members.

  • IGN Playlist — Our product to help gamers have all their games in one place, and share curated lists with each other.

In addition to IGN’s customer-facing products, the teams also manage a number of other internal tools, and legacy apps including the CMS that our editorial team uses to create content and manage our games database, and IGN owned sister sites, like HowLongToBeat.com.

Working in the open

Returning to IGN, I was determined to follow the positive examples set by other companies in the gaming industry—transparency with our community.

I took a personal approach by writing on our corporate blog, and I encouraged my teams to join me in engaging directly with our community on IGN.com, Discord, Reddit, and more. Embracing criticism and questions head-on was challenging, but it's a belief I hold dear and continuously push us to embrace even further.

Together, we're breaking down barriers and building trust through open communication. We value the feedback and connection with our community, always striving to go above and beyond for an even stronger relationship.

Delicate balance

Transforming our teams into empowered product-driven forces presented its toughest challenge: shifting the perception of engineering and product from cost centers to value drivers and customer experts.

Simultaneously, we navigated major hurdles like sustaining our core advertising business, modernizing legacy tech, and innovating new user-driven products to diversify revenue.

Amidst these complexities, we remained unwavering in our vision, seeking innovative solutions and maintaining a forward-thinking mindset. It required diligent navigation and determination to strike the right balance and drive our transformative journey forward.

Key projects

Key projects and milestones for our org.

  • Game help progress sync, Q1 2021
    The team enabled progress syncing for game help for users that signed in to an account. Driving more value for signed-in members.

  • IGN CMS Rebuild, Q2 2021
    The team was finishing up a major rebuild of IGN’s internal services and editorial CMS when I arrived, this project went across the finish line in Q2, and was a culmination of massive effort that enables a huge spate of future product and content development.

  • Core App Rebuild, Q2 2021
    Our product and engineering org relaunched our core app build in react native, allowing us to share and reuse components across our site and apps, and unify Andriod and iOS feature development.

  • New games, movies, and shows pages on IGN, Q3 2021
    Rebuilding pages that previously focused on news content, to be focused around education and utility for customers who are looking up titles. Complements by an updates to updates to our apps and web stories feed to expose these pages more and drive additional traffic

  • Community Reviews, Q4 2021
    Part of acknowledging a world where not everyone relies on a single score or opinion to decide on their entertainment, community reviews are designed as a simple and useful way for gamers to share an opinion on games, and even remember what specifically they liked about a title.

  • IGN Playlist, Q1 2022
    In Q4 we announced IGN Playlist, and launched and early-access sign up program as well as hit a major milestone in the products development, bringing us closer to a 1.0 launch and building a funnel to create our first group of fans for the product.

Boomerang

I worked at IGN twice. Here’s my work as a Senior Product Designer.

Customer obsessed

None of the work matters if you’re not making your customers happy. Here’s some of the what out users said about IGN Playlist.