Reinventing TiVO

2015 was the perfect timing to join TiVo for anyone with a passion for innovation. At that time, the pioneering company that first let you rewind live TV wanted to reinvent itself and, for that purpose, had hired Ira Bahr to lead the Retail organization as General Manager and CMO. When Ira brought me on board as a Director of User Experience, he had already introduced Skip mode (TiVo’s ability to skip commercial interruptions while watching cable television). However, there was still a long way to go to make TiVo an innovative TV platform again.

I built up a dream team, starting with the creative director –Paul B.– from Apple. I hired him during my first 30 days in the company, becoming an immediate innovation catalyst. Then, while growing the in-house team, I brought Accenture Digital to help us build the technical infrastructure that we needed for our next-gen projects. Jammy P. –at the time, the head of technology at TiVo– and I made a great partnership, and –right from the beginning– we identified many opportunities to collaborate, including the improvement of the agile process. I also hired IDEO to help us with the ethnographic research and Blast Interactive, who helped me run an experimentation program using Optimizely.

Thanks to my partners in product marketing and dev, we institutionalized Design Thinking across the retail organization. The phenomenal research team at TiVo proved to be my best partner in crime to run great Value Proposition Design workshops, Empathy Map sessions, and Ideation sessions based on TiVo’s personas. I would have never done it without the veteran researchers Giovanni R. and Smita D.  

The five-day design sprints created by Jake Knapp at Google ventures a few years earlier, also became particularly successful –and popular– at TiVo. Everyone appreciated the collaborative nature of the working sessions that I set up prior to major product/dev epics. 

As a team, we were convinced that the future TV experience 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 all that switching between inputs and remotes. Our mission was to free up all the streaming, cable, and free over-the-air TV from their silos –and their annoying ads– and provide a seamless experience across all devices.

TiVo’s innovation program towards a live and recorded over-the-air media ecosystem eventually crystallized around a project codenamed Mantis. One of the designers in my team finally came up with its commercial name: Mavrik. 

The project’s scope ended up overwhelming our limited resources, and everyone had to roll up their sleeves. I helped map out all the existing APIs necessary for this project and identified new ones to be created. I also identified the specific use cases that we designers needed to support at different moments in the customer journey –and their correlation with specific third-party services (e.g., Zuora for micropayments). 

I led my team through all the design phases of this project –which left us with a tremendous sense of pride… but also with disappointment. Immediately after the pilot, the program was shelved. In retrospect, Mavrik served as a great inspiration for future media products such as Amazon’s FireTV cast. In a way, its spirit marches on.

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 just a pleasure. At the time, searching across all video sources (cable, streaming, apps…) using voice was deemed a must-have feature to rejuvenate the brand and stay competitive. Thanks to our partnerships with Amazon and Google –which proved highly creative and fruitful– we introduced voice commands via remote control and through Alexa and Google Home / Nest products. 

Many advanced use cases were also explored, like using Apple Watch as a remote control, pausing TiVo after pressing a Ring video doorbell, or accessing TiVo content/recordings via Echo Show (see the image gallery below). 

My passion for data-driven design decisions made me sign a collaboration deal with Optimizely – arguably the most robust multi-variate testing platform in the market. Alongside Nicola Mattis –and the creative team behind Blast interactive– we run an exciting experimentation program that allowed us to tweak and improve the e-commerce experience on a weekly basis. The results were fascinating. The impact on specific sales campaigns was quantified between 8% and 15%. The complex multi-variate scenarios involved made the exclusive attribution to just design enhancements difficult, but the contributions were definitely there. 

TiVo was recognized with a CES Innovation Award in 2017 for the implementation of voice control in their products. Second only to Apple TV with their own integration of Siri. 

We enabled our customers to use their voice to access TiVo’s most iconic functions: SkipMode (to skip recorded ads), QuickMode, TV guide, info, last channel, and… play their favorite shows. David Keane –our senior copywriter– came up with the most ingenious and funny voice commands ever. For instance, to skip ads: Nuke this crap! (Yes, that was TiVo’s corporate voice and tone).

The story has a happy ending: Rovi ended up acquiring Tivo for $1.1 billion. The breadth of our innovation portfolio, the fantastic talent in every department, and TiVo’s intellectual property made this acquisition happen in the end. On a personal level, the very same day of the acquisition, I got accepted to join the Innovation Program at Stanford Graduate School. Those were definitely the signs of changing times.