Leading a pilot migration onto a shared streaming platform

Problem

The shared streaming platform had no migration playbook. The brand chosen for the pilot had run a bespoke setup for years, and it was the first to move.

My role

I was one of two people chosen by senior technology leadership to lead the pilot, from kickoff to launch over about five months.

What I did

Compared the existing service with the new platform and wrote requirements to close every gap, so users kept the experience they were used to.
Planned the migration of content, metadata, and merchandising for the new front-end experience.
Configured the new purchase flow.
Planned a read-only period to protect subscribers at cutover.
Organized QA testing and worked directly with the QA partner.
Learned how products and licenses worked on the new platform for the first time. That learning became the model for later migrations.

The result

The pilot launched on the shared platform. After cutover, subscriber growth was strong, and performance-related support issues, which had been the most common, fell to near zero. The pilot's lessons became the playbook for the brands that followed.

After the pilot

My role shifted from leading one migration to carrying the playbook into the others. I wrote integration requirements from vendor documentation for the brands that followed, and I became the go-to product expert for the shared platform, covering everything except content.