Reinventing TiVo

Building Up the Dream Team

2015 was the perfect time to join TiVo for anyone with a passion for innovation. The pioneering company that first let you rewind live TV wanted to reinvent itself, and it had hired Ira Bahr as General Manager and CMO to lead the retail organization. When Ira brought me on board as Director of User Experience, he had already introduced SkipMode, TiVo's ability to skip commercial interruptions while watching cable television. But there was still a long way to go before TiVo could become an innovative TV platform again.

I built a dream team, starting with a creative director from Apple, Paul B. I hired him during my first 30 days at the company, and he became an immediate catalyst for innovation. While growing the in-house team, I brought in Accenture Digital to build the technical infrastructure our next-generation projects needed. Jammy P., then TiVo's head of technology, and I formed a strong partnership; from the beginning, we found opportunities to collaborate, including improving the agile process. I also hired IDEO to help with ethnographic research, and Blast Interactive to run an experimentation program on Optimizely, a leading platform for A/B and multivariate testing.

Thanks to my partners in product marketing and development, we institutionalized Design Thinking across the retail organization. TiVo's phenomenal research team became my best partner in crime for Value Proposition Design workshops, Empathy Map sessions, and ideation sessions built on TiVo's personas. I could never have done it without veteran researchers Giovanni R. and Smita D.

The five-day design sprints Jake Knapp had created at Google Ventures a few years earlier also became particularly successful and popular at TiVo. Everyone appreciated the collaborative working sessions I organized before major product and development epics.

Mavrik

As a team, we were convinced that the future of TV would break free from siloed apps whose content couldn't be searched across. In our vision of a unified entertainment system, there was no room for switching between inputs and remotes. Our mission was to free streaming, cable, and over-the-air TV from their silos and their annoying ads, and to provide a seamless experience across all devices.

TiVo's innovation program for a live and recorded over-the-air media ecosystem crystallized around a project codenamed Mantis. A designer on my team came up with its commercial name: Mavrik.

The project's scope overwhelmed our limited resources, and everyone had to roll up their sleeves. I mapped the existing APIs the project needed and identified new ones to be created. I also defined the use cases we designers had to support at each moment of the customer journey, and their correlation with specific third-party services, such as Zuora for micropayments.

I led my team through every design phase of the project, which left us with a tremendous sense of pride… and with disappointment. Immediately after the pilot, the program was shelved. In retrospect, Mavrik anticipated future media products such as Amazon's Fire TV. Its spirit marches on.

TiVo Ecosystem

We set out to design not just products but an ecosystem of services that would amplify TiVo's value proposition. Collaborating with David Shoop's innovation team was a pleasure. At the time, voice search across all video sources (cable, streaming, apps) was considered a must-have feature to rejuvenate the brand and stay competitive. Through creative and fruitful partnerships with Amazon and Google, we introduced voice commands via the remote control and via Alexa and Google Home/Nest products.

We also explored many advanced use cases: using an Apple Watch as a remote control, pausing TiVo when someone pressed a Ring video doorbell, or accessing TiVo content and recordings on an Echo Show.

Improving TiVo BOLT

My passion for data-driven design decisions led me to sign a collaboration deal with Optimizely. Alongside Nicola Mattis and the creative team at Blast Interactive, we ran an experimentation program that let us tweak and improve the e-commerce experience week by week. The results were fascinating: the impact on specific sales campaigns was quantified at 8–15 percent. The complexity of the multivariate scenarios made it hard to attribute results to design enhancements alone, but the contributions were definitely there.

TiVo was recognized with a CES Innovation Award in 2017 for implementing voice control in its products, at a time when only Apple TV was integrating voice (Siri) into the product experience. We enabled customers to use their voice for TiVo's most iconic functions: SkipMode (to skip recorded ads), QuickMode, the TV guide, info, last channel, and playing their favorite shows. David K., our senior copywriter, came up with some of the funniest voice commands ever. To skip ads: "Nuke this crap!" Yes, that was TiVo's corporate voice and tone.

Conclusion

The story has a happy ending: Rovi acquired TiVo for $1.1 billion. On a personal level, that very same day I was accepted into the Innovation Program at Stanford Graduate School. Those were clear signs of changing times.