Hulu Customer Service Experience
Aligning Product & Service Roadmap with Hulu’s Brand Promise
Prior to their integration with Disney+ and ESPN+, the Viewer Experience team at Hulu in 2019 was looking to evolve their strategy and definition of customer service for their omni-device digital experience. In leading the strategic imitative, my role was to bring the people together from across organizations who had never worked on a shared initiative or with similar processes (Raizlabs, Rightpoint & Genpact) and to deliver clear, actionable, and valuble research to the Hulu VX team.
Setting Up the Initiative For Success
Before the kick-off at Hulu HQ, I aligned and integrated the project makers who had never worked together before — clarifying roles and responsibilities, ensuring agile methodologies and mindset, and constructing a clear project approach — all so that when we were in front of the Hulu team we presented a shared vision and collaboration style.
This co-working model, developed to integrate folks across agile and waterfall backgrounds, divergent and intersecting skillsets, along with myriad non-technical stakeholders became a sought after system to approach cross functional initiatives. To this day I get requests for the template.
We’ve had reports that team members felt they did some of their best work for Hulu, that they enjoyed every minute of the project, and wished others would run as smoothly, joyfully, and clearly as this one did.
Defining “The Most Important Thing”
For Hulu I ran my traditional kick-off session that focuses on three things — introduce the full team of makers and stakeholders, clarify the scope of work, and define why the initiative is important.
Just as in highlander, there can only be one …most important thing. A north star should create gravity and clarity for decision-making. While we note what every person feels is most important, the session ends only when a single objective is selected.
This technique helps everyone involved avoid confusion and future disagreements. I attribute much of this initiative’s success to the foundation created with this exercise.
Foundational Research
After kick-off the team spent weeks interviewing internal stakeholders and doing initial competitive research, and came away with five areas of opportunity for the Hulu Viewer Experience team.
These would become the cornerstones of each future product initiative, and guide the VX team’s strategy for their long term roadmap.
Validating Ideas & Queuing For Production
With the area of opportunities identified, the team continued to develop concepts that could be quickly validated with real users to define and build a backlog and long term roadmap for the VX team.