Content Studio

The operation was spread across spreadsheets for productions, email onboarding, separate resource tools, and finance outside the main process. Each area solved its own needs, but the full process did not close: shared data, timely compliance, and a clear view of the internal cost per production were missing.

The challenge was not only to centralize information. It was to automate and integrate the flows between teams, save time, reduce manual work, and cover more operations with the same people.

When I became PM at the end of 2021, Vendor Compliance Ops and Finance were already operating fully on the platform. The adoption gap was in Production: much of its work still happened in external tools because the in house system was too complex and did not fit the team's work.

We interviewed Production, Post production, Vendor Compliance Ops, Finance, HR, and Business Development, and brought frictions into a shared backlog through weekly checkpoints. Two blockers mattered most: we could not see the cost of the in house part of each production, and we could not book slots to know in time whether outside help was needed when the internal team was already busy. With the Tech Lead, we prioritized impact against effort and validated with prototypes, evidence, and risks before building.

Once discovery was clear, I prioritized bringing the operation into one system. Before adding an initiative, I checked whether it reduced complexity, solved a validated pain, and helped build trust with the Production team.

That led us to add time tracking for in house teams and booking, which allowed people to reserve blocks in a future calendar. We could see whether internal capacity was enough for a production and, when it was not, decide whether to hire outside help and how that decision affected the budget.

We also added invoices generated from the fees already loaded into the system. This greatly reduced errors and the operational cost of correcting them. Anything that would not be used or would deepen fragmentation stayed out of the roadmap.

The most important result was not shipping more features. It was changing how we built the product. At first, we prioritized functionality without a discovery process to understand how teams worked, what blocked them, and what they needed the system to solve. We spent time, effort, and money on features that nobody used afterward.

When I moved into the PM role, the focus changed. Production resisted using the platform because it did not see enough value in it, so we started building with adoption first. Every initiative had to start from a real friction and explain its business impact: helping people make data driven decisions, reducing manual work, or helping the team operate better.

From there, Content Studio combined BI tools for data driven decisions with automations and integrations that saved time and operating cost. We stopped measuring the product by how much we delivered and started measuring how much it was used, which decisions it improved, and which manual work it avoided. The data that follows shows the reach of that operation and how it was adopted across teams.

Working on Content Studio for so many years and moving from UI Developer to Product Designer and then PM taught me to see the product from different places. As a UI Developer, I made sure the components needed by the system were there. As a Product Designer, I reported to roles that prioritized shipping features over discovery. I also understood that the system had been built before the teams who would operate it were established. They later arrived with their own tools, contexts, and deadlines, and the platform did not always fit their work.

As a PM, moving from prioritizing output to thinking about outcomes changed the team's dynamic. We stopped building from isolated requests and focused on continuous discovery, with weekly interviews across the operational teams. Shipping features was no longer enough: we had to understand the friction, connect each initiative to business impact, and measure whether people actually adopted it. I learned that an operational platform creates value when the teams who need to use it adopt it, face less friction, and operate better because of it.