Shipping across CTV, mobile, and web — from individual features to a full platform convergence.
When I joined Pluto TV in early 2021, the design team was five people. The company was still in a mid-size startup phase — everything ran lean, decisions were made fast, and we shipped constantly. As Pluto grew and was folded deeper into Paramount's ecosystem, the pace changed, the processes got more formal, and the work got more cross-functional.
I touched a wide range of platforms and problems: managing CTV app designs, overhauling On Demand, evolving the Search experience, and eventually driving convergence work that bridged Pluto TV and Paramount+.
CTV · 2021
Platform stewardship
across every screen.
My first major responsibility was owning designs for the webCTV platform — smart TV apps on Samsung, LG, Vizio, and others. This meant maintaining high-fidelity designs within shared libraries, keeping things consistent as the product evolved, and supporting platform scrum teams building new features across devices.
In a small team, you're often the first and last line of design review. That pressure pushed me to get very good at documentation, edge-case thinking, and communicating design decisions clearly to engineers and PMs under the same time pressure.
WebCTV · On Demand
Multi-platform ownership
Managed designs across Samsung, LG, and Vizio CTV apps, keeping consistent UI across varied hardware constraints.
Shared library upkeep
Created, maintained, and documented high-fidelity components within team shared libraries in Figma.
Scrum team support
Embedded with platform scrum teams to ship new features and keep existing ones healthy — all within Agile workflows.
CTV · Mobile · Web · 2023–2024
On Demand,
redesigned.
In 2023, the ask came to rethink the On Demand experience across the entire Pluto TV ecosystem. VOD had significant potential — but the existing design wasn't helping users find or engage with it. We needed a ground-up redesign, fast, across every platform.
How might we make On Demand feel as intuitive and browsable as live TV — across every platform Pluto runs on?
How we worked
To move quickly without losing quality, we stood up a SWAT team — a focused group pulled together specifically for this redesign. I worked closely with product managers, project managers, and other designers to align on strategy, generate concepts, and pressure-test ideas before they went anywhere near development.
Beyond just making screens, I was heavily involved in strategy discussions and leadership presentations. That exposure meant I had to be precise about how I framed decisions - not just what we were building, but why, and what we expected it to do.
Validating with real users
I ran three separate rounds of user testing throughout the redesign process — not just to validate final designs, but to catch issues early and inform decisions while there was still time to iterate. Each round sharpened the product a bit more.
- 01 Concept testing — Early explorations with representative users to understand how they thought about browsing VOD content.
- 02 Prototype validation — Mid-fidelity prototypes tested against key tasks to surface navigation and hierarchy issues before high-fidelity production.
- 03 Pre-launch usability — Final round to confirm the redesign held up across platforms and surfaces any remaining friction before going live.
Cross-platform · Web + Mobile
The redesign launched in 2024. By year end, VOD accounted for 15% of all Total Viewing Hours on Pluto TV — up from 4% when we started. We hit 85M VOD Total Viewing Hours with +72% YoY and +21% MoM growth, 16M monthly active users, and 5.3 hours of VOD per user.
CTV · Mobile · Web · 2024
Search as a
discovery surface.
Search on Pluto TV was functional, but it wasn't doing everything it could. Users were coming to Search with intent, but the experience wasn't helping them browse when they didn't know exactly what they wanted. My work on Search focused on closing that gap.
How might we turn Search from a lookup tool into a place people actively browse — even before they type anything?
I led design on a set of Search feature expansions across platforms. These weren't flashy redesigns — they were thoughtful additions that each addressed a specific friction point in how users found content.
Search Autocomplete
Launched across tvOS, Roku, Fire TV, and Google/Android TV. Roughly a quarter of all search visitors use autocomplete, with a 25% usage rate.
Search History
Surfaced past searches to help users return to content faster, reducing the friction of repeat lookups.
Pre-Search Browsing
Turned the Search landing page into a browsable content surface. Updating the label from "Recommendations" to "Popular Now" drove a 5% improvement in pre-search engagement.
Autocomplete · tvOS
Browse · Pre-search
Autocomplete had negative results in our first experiment. We went back, worked with the backend team to improve chip quality and quantity, then ran it again. Second time landed.
Iteration in practiceOne of the more instructive moments from Search work: autocomplete failed its first experiment. Rather than shipping a degraded experience, I advocated for another round — this time working closely with backend to increase the number of chips shown and improve suggestion accuracy. The second experiment was a success.
Collectively, Search improvements drove 5% more clicks on Search per visit, and moving Search to position 1 in the global nav contributed a +1.1% improvement to Monthly Platform Users and +6% to Search Visitors. A quarter of all search users now engage with autocomplete suggestions.
Cross-platform · 2025
Paramount+ convergence
and design systems work.
In 2025, following the Paramount acquisition, the Pluto TV team was asked to start converging our codebase and design systems toward Paramount+. This was a different kind of design challenge — less about user flows, more about systems thinking, cross-team collaboration, and meticulous documentation.
How do you merge two products' design systems without breaking either — or losing what makes each one distinct?
Pluto TV's platform upgrade and Paramount convergence were covered by Deadline.
Component work
I worked closely with the Paramount+ design team to align on shared components, cross-referencing both systems and identifying what could be tokenized and shared. This required constant back-and-forth — lots of Figma sessions, documentation reviews, and decisions about where to standardize versus where to preserve platform-specific patterns.
I also assisted the Design Systems team with component cleanup — helping tokenize other designers' components so they could work across both Pluto TV and Paramount+. This was detail-oriented, sometimes tedious work, but it's the kind of work that makes everything downstream easier.
Convergence · VOD
Convergence designs
Beyond the systems work, I applied the convergence effort to actual product design — revisiting VOD and Search, plus tackling content details pages across all platforms. These pages needed to work within the Paramount+ component framework while still feeling appropriate for Pluto TV's free, ad-supported experience.
VOD convergence
Updated On Demand designs to use Paramount+ components while maintaining the UX patterns from the 2024 redesign.
Search convergence
Adapted Search flows and components to align with Paramount+ patterns, ensuring a coherent experience within the shared system.
Content details pages
Redesigned content detail pages across all platforms using the new token-based component system.
Convergence · Content Details
Reflection
Real product work,
at every scale.
Pluto TV taught me what it means to design at scale on a product that's always on — one that millions of people use daily across devices as different as a phone and a TV.
I came in as a designer who could execute well. I left having also learned how to run user research, contribute to product strategy, present to leadership, navigate acquisitions, and work across multiple design systems at the same time.
The SWAT team model for the VOD redesign remains one of the most effective ways I've seen a design and product team move fast without cutting corners. And the value of running tests before you're locked in — even rough, scrappy ones — is something I'll bring to every project going forward.