December 25, 2024 • 53 mins
In this episode, Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia interviews Michael Cerda, Chief Product and Technology Officer at TelevisaUnivision, the world's leading Spanish-language media company reaching 125 million Spanish speakers daily across the US and Latin America.
TelevisaUnivision launched ViX, a consumer streaming platform, two years ago to compete with US-based giants like Netflix and Disney+. ViX has already surpassed 50 million global monthly active users, driven by the world's largest library of Spanish-language content, including major soccer rights like the World Cup, European Championship, and Champions League.
Michael's impressive career includes launching Disney+ as VP of Product at Disney, leading Apple's first Credit Card as CPO at Goldman Sachs, and working directly with Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. At ViX, he leads product management, design, and engineering, leveraging AI to enrich metadata, improve content recommendations, and solve the 'cold start' problem—all while steering ViX toward profitability by late 2024.
We explore ViX's journey from launch to a major player in the Spanish-language streaming market, the integration of AI in content recommendations, and the balance between traditional TV viewing habits and modern streaming interfaces. We also discuss how TelevisaUnivision leverages cultural insights to drive engagement and the challenges of personalizing content for a diverse Hispanic audience across 19 countries.
What you'll learn:
- Michael's approach to scaling ViX from launch to over 50 million users in two years.
- How AI and large language models are used to enrich metadata and improve user experience.
- Strategies for personalizing content recommendations across 19 countries.
- The development of specific user personas to target diverse audiences.
- How TelevisaUnivision balances free and premium tiers in their streaming service.
Key Takeaways:
- AI-Powered Recommendations: Michael highlights the use of AI to solve the 'cold start' problem in content recommendations.
- Cultural Sensitivity: He emphasizes the importance of understanding cultural nuances in creating engaging content for Hispanic audiences.
- Rapid Scaling: Michael discusses the challenges and strategies involved in building and launching a streaming service in just 9 months.
- User-Centric Design: He explains how ViX tailors its interface and content to cater to both traditional TV viewers and modern streaming users.
- Product Management in Media: Michael shares insights on adapting product management principles from tech to the media industry, drawing parallels between building products and his passions for music, yoga, and cooking.
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- Join Product School's free events here
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Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Michael Cerda
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
One of your hot takes here.
You said product managers aretoo utopian.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Okay, well, to be clear, I don't think every
product manager is too utopian,but it's a tendency.
That's a very different dynamicthan what you're going to be as
a product manager at Meta.
People ask me what's the numberone thing you look for?
And it is actually curiosity.
A million percent.
It's a big accomplishment tobuild and launch this streaming
service in the timeframe that wedid.
We basically did it in ninemonths, which I think is a
(00:26):
record.
Hey, this content asset reallyhas 30 pieces of metadata.
Now we apply that through thewhole catalog and now we can
better cross pollinate withvectors that one piece of
content is similar to anotherpiece of content.
Rfu, recency, frequency andengagement.
Recency is how recent thatperson has been here.
Frequency, how often do theycome, and engagement that's how
(00:48):
much they watch, how much timethey spend.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Hey, this is Carlos's AI voice clone.
He's the CEO of Product Schooland the host on the Product
Podcast.
Let me introduce today's guestfirst.
Michael Kurda is the ChiefProduct and Technology Officer
at Televisa Univision, theworld's leading Spanish-language
media company, reaching 125million Spanish speakers daily
across the US and Latin America.
Two years ago, they launched VX, a consumer streaming platform
(01:15):
competing with US-based giantslike Netflix and Disney+.
Vix has already surpassed 50million global monthly active
users, driven by the world'slargest library of Spanish
language content, includingmajor soccer rights like the
World Cup, european Championshipand Champions League.
Michael's career is equallyimpressive.
He launched Disney Plus as VPof Product at Disney, led
(01:37):
Apple's first credit card as CPOat Goldman Sachs and worked
directly with Mark Zuckerberg atMeta.
At VIX, michael leads productmanagement, design and
engineering.
He leverages AI to enrichmetadata, improve content
recommendations and solve thecold start problem, all while
steering VIX towardprofitability by late 2024.
In this episode, we coverpersonalizing content for
(01:59):
millions across 19 countries,using AI and large language
models for metadata and UX,balancing traditional TV habits
with modern streaming.
Scaling a streaming service injust nine months, targeting
personas with cultural insights.
What stood out to me wasMichael's approach to product
management.
He draws parallels betweenbuilding products and his
passions for music, yoga andcooking.
(02:20):
His emphasis on curiosity asthe top trait for product
managers brings a freshperspective to talent
acquisition in tech.
Let's dive in.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Welcome to the show, michael.
Thank you, carlos.
It's great to be here, michael,let's jump into it.
I see that you were a yogateacher and opened up a yoga
school around 20 years ago.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah, wow, it's been 20 years, but that is true.
I opened up a yoga schoolcalled the Yoga Company and it
was interesting because in thosedays yoga and business weren't
cool to mix those two things.
The idea behind the company wasto make it about company as in
people that was what they call adouble entendre, the use of the
(03:04):
word company, right, peoplethat was what they call a double
entendre, the use of the wordcompany, right.
But I tried to make it like anyproduct person doing a yoga
thing would do.
I tried to make it accessibleto the audience.
In those days in the East SanFrancisco Bay, yoga just wasn't
accessible.
It was always you either got itin a gym, which usually wasn't
great yoga or authentic, got itin a gym, which usually wasn't
(03:27):
great yoga or authentic.
Or you got it in a yoga studiothat was in the back behind a
building up some stairs, in avery quiet, dark space where
everybody was not saying hello,you're welcome, right, and
everybody was meditating whenyou walk in.
So nothing was inviting.
So I tried to create something.
I put a yoga school like in ashopping center.
It was next to like anAlbertson shopping center,
across from a McDonald's, nextto the CVS, right, you couldn't
(03:51):
miss it and you know, we broughtyoga to about 5,000 new yoga
students and exposed it to themand I had a really good time
doing that.
I could only do it for a fewyears because I did it at the
time that we referred to forthose of us that were around
back then as the nuclear winterin Silicon Valley.
This was just after the dot-combubble burst and sort of right
(04:13):
after 9-11.
In that time period, a passionproject and trying to do
something that felt good and wasgood for health and good for
people and wellness.
And I've been a practitionerever since, although I don't
have the school anymore.
But yes, that was a wonderful,wonderful experience and I see
(04:34):
the background.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
You have plenty of instruments there, so I'm very
curious to know how you wereable to connect your practices,
your passions outside of work,also to the work that you do.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah.
So music I've been playing allmy life and I've only been a
product guy for whatever 25years.
But I realized that they'reboth one in the same.
Being a yoga teacher wassimilar.
Being I love to cook that isvery similar.
(05:06):
It's all about what to build forwho over what period of time,
and you could map that acrossall of those areas, right?
If you're a songwriter, it'slike what song are you writing,
who are you writing it for andwhen do you want to release it?
What does it mean to release itand give it a life of its own?
It's just like a productrelease, right?
You're very deterministic,you're very methodical.
It's just like a productrelease right, you're very
deterministic, you're verymethodical, right?
All of these things lend toeach other, and so over the
(05:34):
years I've managed to do bothand weave them in and out.
And you know I have a Latinjazz group called the Yellow
House Orchestra.
You know we've put many recordsout.
You can see them out there onSpotify and over YouTube and
things.
We've put many records out.
You can see them out there onSpotify and over YouTube and
things.
But I also have a pop projectcalled the Sunday Review, which
is this is interesting as aproduct guy and any of the
product people listening, thisis a total product guy's move on
(05:54):
a band, right.
So during the pandemic, the guywho's my designer right now and
he worked with me beforedesigner, his name is Chris
Phillips, he's in New York, I'mjust outside of San Francisco.
So during the pandemic wethought, hey, let's write some
songs together and we startedwriting them and this was the
constraint we created, as if itwas 1988 still.
(06:17):
But we're the same people.
But we knew now what we wouldknow then, right.
So we have the same level ofmusic theory and understanding.
In 88, when we're at highschool, at least he and I were.
What would we have writtentogether if we were in the band?
And that's the whole project.
So we're writing these songsand they're deliberately, with
(06:39):
guilty pleasure, right, they'redeliberately from those times
and what we get is somethingthat's that's very much, uh, you
know, steely dan, ish, hollownotes, ish and everything in
that ilk, um.
But it's super fun because wecan get away with it, because
it's deliberate, once again,very deterministic, right, about
the craft, um, and we just wejust have a ball with it.
(07:02):
That band's based in new yorkcity.
So whenever I go to new yorkcity I play with it.
And that band's based in NewYork City, so whenever I go to
New York City I play with thatband.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
There's something about successful professionals
and their level of curiosity,all these incredible product
leaders that I know.
They all have passions and theyfind ways to find time for
those passions because that'salso part of their life, and
then you end up ways to connectin those passions in unexpected
ways.
But ultimately, I think, havingthat inherent curiosity, it's
(07:29):
very important.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
You know, when I look and evaluate product managers,
whether I'm hiring some orwhether I'm looking at my own
team, people ask me what's thenumber one thing you look for?
And it is actually curiosity, amillion percent.
Because if you're not curious,you're not necessarily realizing
(07:51):
that you don't know what youdon't know.
And if you can accept that youdon't know what you don't know,
you can go hunting, you can goon a journey and you could find
things you could pour throughyour data right.
You could pour through youraudience right.
Um, we were just doing thatvery recently.
We're just coming up with aproject, um, with where I work
(08:12):
right now at televisa univision,where we're looking at our
audience and we're like tryingto determine, with the data we
have, who are the personas inthat audience with.
If you know what a persona isamong your audience, you can
start to double down on theirlike behaviors, their needs,
their mindsets and therefore youcan build for them.
(08:32):
And in our case we're in 19different countries.
So it's a little wild becauseit's not all created equal.
Our US market, because we doSpanish language video streaming
right.
So in the US there's a verydifferent Hispanic audience than
there is in, say, colombia orin Mexico.
Those are distinct audiences,so we have to be mindful of the
(08:55):
regions and mindful of ourcontent catalog as it relates to
those regions.
You know, in the US we have,for example, one of the personas
that's very highly engaged.
We call this person and this isjust working names, right, so
don't take it too seriously butstraightforward, sophia.
And Sophia is someone thatshe's a single mom and she wants
(09:16):
things to just work.
She doesn't want to spend timegetting her TV dialed into the
right input right, it's just gotto turn on and work.
She doesn't have time to searchfor something In her journey.
She's got to find somethingquickly to put it on and have
that entertainment start.
And this is somebody thatbinges on our originals we have
a whole bunch of originals butgenerally busy with work and
(09:38):
family and really needstechnology and any kind of
subscription plans to bestraightforward, right, that
stuff just has to work.
So when you think about and, bythe way, straightforward,
sophia, as we call her, isbilingual.
She's in the US, she just aswell watches things on other
streaming services.
It's just that she comes to usfor specific things that
(10:00):
resonate from the country thatshe comes from, right, or the
heritage that she has thatresonate from the country that
she comes from right, or theheritage that she has.
So, anyway, what I'm getting tois personas, and being persona
aware is one of the criticalaspects of the product journey,
because you're digging into youraudience, you're understanding,
again, behaviors, needs andmindsets, and only then can you
(10:21):
know what to build for who, overwhat period.
I might say in this next threemonths I'm going to roll out a
dozen features that are gearedtoward this persona, knowing
very well that I'm going toleave another persona let's call
him Game Day Gary who comesjust to watch soccer.
So, a bunch of soccer, and Garyjust comes to watch soccer.
(10:44):
Then he leaves, comes back andguess what?
Gary doesn't even speak Spanishproperly.
That's, that's what we'relearning, because we know that
his keyboard is, is, is in, isin English.
So we got to.
We have to think again verydeterministically about what we
built for a straightforwardSophia versus a game day Gary.
A game day Gary.
You know you might think as aproduct person, you might think,
oh, sophia versus a game dayGary.
(11:04):
A game day Gary.
You might think as a productperson, you might think, oh, gee
, you might come up with aproduct SKU that's just
sports-based or that's justseasonal, or you might go out on
a limb and say let's targetgame day, gary, with an annual
plan, that way he doesn't churnout in the off seasons.
(11:24):
You see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Totally Well, let's start with just giving us an
overview of your company,Televisa Univision I know it's
huge and specifically what youdo as a chief product and
technology officer.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, so this company has been around for decades as
two different companies, soTelevisa in Mexico and Univision
in the United States.
So when I was like a little kid, right, I lived with my
grandparents and they were.
They had come from Mexico, froma place called Morelia in
Michoacan, which I'm sure Lauraknows, and my father was born in
(11:59):
the United States, inCalifornia, and then I came
along in the 70s and you knowwhen my dad's era were born.
What's interesting is they weretrying to become more American
right, so there was goingEnglish first, they were leaning
more into English and so by thetime I came around, everybody's
speaking English.
But my grandparents are stillspeaking Spanish, right, and so,
and everything they had on TVat the time was Spanish
(12:23):
television and Spanish languagetelevision, and it was called.
It was a network called SINCanal 34, los Angeles, and I'll
never forget that, and it wasall the novellas, it was all the
lucha libre, the wrestling.
You know the early days ofwrestling.
I think I first saw like Andrethe Giant there before I saw him
on USA or whoever acquired itlater, before the Ed McMahon era
(12:47):
, I think, and I saw all thisstuff and it was a memory and of
course, my grandparents passedaway and so forth and I had been
working on Disney Plus.
I was the head of product forDisney Plus for a few years and
I was recruited into Univisionjust before they merged with
(13:08):
Televisa.
So Televisa a bunch of big TVstations and studios in Mexico.
Univision a bunch of studiosand TV stations in the US, one
of them being SAE Enit.
That became Univision part.
That became, that becameUnivision.
And so now the company's mergedafter it, just after I joined,
and merged to combine content,catalogs and assets and
(13:31):
audiences and markets and form abigger company and build a
streaming service.
You know, knowing, knowing thatstreaming is sort of the next
inflection in consumerentertainment and consumption,
we knew we needed to buildsomething very compelling and
very, very deliberate, targetedtoward our market.
And as people were cuttingcords and linear right, we're
(13:54):
there with streaming.
So my area is an area we callVIX, v-i-x that's the name of
the streaming service and it's afree, ad supported service with
a premium tier right.
So on the free service, whichin the business, we call AVOD,
which is, you know, advertisingvideo on demand, although we
(14:19):
have some live as well.
So it's not really AVOD, it'sAVOD plus.
So on the VOD side, video ondemand, we have 53,000 hours of
content ranging from likenovellas, original series and a
whole bunch of movies.
We have some channels and thisis interesting from a product
perspective too, because a lotof us as consumers tend to
(14:42):
consume, I think, video ondemand.
That's what Netflix gives us,right, a video on demand
interface.
In the markets we're in,there's a lot of people that are
cutting the cable cord andgoing right online and going to
streaming.
So we've built the interfacesthat they're used to seeing in
TV, which in the business, wecall the EPG electronic
(15:04):
programming grid.
It's an old school term, butthink about the last time you
turned on the TV guide right andyou saw the grid of channels.
You saw channel two, three,four and you saw the shows right
across the rows.
So we have a channels interface, an EPG interface, where we
have 84 in the US and 71, Ithink, now in Mexico.
And again it's all the samecontent, just the discovery
(15:28):
mechanism is different.
And then the interface is likeyou're flipping through the
channels and just putting onwhat you put on, versus in the
VOD environment you're like, oh,I want to go to this series and
this episode, right, those aretwo different journeys and we
get two different valuepropositions out there and we
can let our audience decide.
We do have 24-7 news.
We do have a whole bunch ofsports, a bunch of soccer
(15:51):
primarily Liga MX in Mexico,champions League, uefa a whole
bunch of soccer.
So we end up in the US gettinga lot of soccer fans, agnostic
of the language, which isinteresting, but of course in
Mexico we're kind of the home ofsoccer.
(16:11):
That's the AVOD side.
We also have a premium service,which in the US is $6.99 per
month, and in the premiumservice it's a whole bunch of
originals.
It's new, you know.
Think about the idea.
We've all become accustomed tothe Netflix service.
It's a whole bunch of originals.
It's new, you know.
Think about the idea We've allbecome accustomed to the Netflix
original right, or even theApple TV Plus original, et
cetera.
(16:32):
When I was at Disney, we hadoriginals.
We also have originals, andwhen we started VIX, we actually
hired a lot of people that hadbeen working on the Netflix
originals for Spanish language.
They were the first sort ofcontent team here, and so
there's a whole bunch of seriesthat we've got that, if you're
(16:53):
the Netflix type of viewer,these would resonate with you.
We launched some of these.
Some of them resonated, some ofthem didn't, right, this is how
you find, like in any product,product market fit, and ours is
not only with the interfaceslike I was getting at, with VOD
versus channels-based, but alsowith the content, and what we're
, I think, realizing is that alot of the content that
(17:16):
resonates most is the contentthat's closest to home.
Right, it's the content thatyou're not finding elsewhere.
In our case, you know we havesome originals around.
You know Maria Felix, we haveEl Mujer del Diablo, we have El
(17:37):
Show, which is all about theshow that was on in the 80s
called Paco Stanley.
It was a variety show and wehave a whole docu-series around
how that happened and how he wasassassinated and all this crazy
stuff, right?
So all that stuff resonates and, of course, the novellas is the
lion's share, that's thehighest watched type of content.
(18:02):
So what we're doing is we'rebringing this value proposition
uniquely, I think to ouraudience, and this is content
that they're not necessarilyfinding in other places, and
it's very intentional and it'svery, very close to home to the
audience.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah, and I think for some of the people who might be
listening, they don't speakSpanish they might not have an
idea of how big of a deal thisis Like.
The last statistic that I sawfrom your product was that there
are over 125 million Spanishspeakers connecting to your
product every day from the USand Latin America.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, it's big.
It's big.
And, of course, when I was atDisney, when I left, we were at
about 100 million payingsubscribers.
That was ginormous.
Again, as a product personbecause I know this is a
product-based podcast you liketo think of what you do as
impactful, right, that's how Imake my sort of career choices.
(19:05):
I think about what is my impactability over time with a given
opportunity At Disney, we got to100 million paying subscribers.
I thought, okay, that wasphenomenal.
What's next?
And I just happened to berecruited into this opportunity
here and I thought, wow, tobring this to the audience in my
(19:25):
heritage.
If my grandparents were stillalive and still watching this
stuff, they would get a kick outof this.
I got to believe somewhere inheaven, they're proud, right.
So I have some purpose here andI think that we have that many
people viewing on a regularbasis.
We've hit the note right.
We've hit the high notes thatmatter and we've even, by the
(19:48):
way, we brought some older stuffback into the catalog, like
Chavo del Ocho, his big popularseries.
A whole bunch of stuff has comethrough that is for the older
generations it's nostalgia.
For the not so older it'sseeing something new but
(20:11):
familiar For families.
It's something that an extendedfamily can watch together.
As we look at our personas thatI mentioned earlier, we start
looking about what's the journeylike in the day in the life of
a given persona.
Sometimes those are extendedhouseholds, right, and you've
got the whole house gathering towatch something on Sunday night
, and that's the way Iremembered it as a kid too.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, so I want to dig deeper into that.
You talked about two differentpersonas the mom that has no
time to do other than work, andyou have the soccer fan.
But if you are talking about abig audience of hundreds of
millions of users, how do you goabout segmenting it, even at a
(20:56):
one-on-one level, so when theylog in into your platform, they
can find content that they aregoing to resonate with?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
It's an excellent question, and the way we're
looking at it is the way we'vegotten to our personas, by the
way, to begin with and we'restill pressure testing this it's
still new.
We're inferring this throughdata, through their viewing
history.
We have a thing called in theUS, on the US audience.
We have a household graph wherewe know a lot about a household
(21:24):
based on a whole bunch of datapoints that we've built out, and
we're inferring a lot of thisand we're clustering and we're
combining and we're making someassumptions as well, by the way.
So, anytime you do personas,you usually start with the data
and then you go to qualitativeresearch after that to really
validate.
We're kind of in that phase.
Now To your question, thoughhow do you target these personas
(21:49):
as they come into the platform?
And that's one place that'sprobably our biggest lever of
opportunity as I look at 2025,is personalizing this.
We all know, as consumers thatuse services like Netflix, that
it's ultra personalized.
Right, your interface is goingto be different than mine,
(22:09):
different than Laura's, etcetera, and that's great because
it's very targeted.
The service has gotten to knowus.
They've gone through at greatlengths to get that really tuned
.
If you think about the lasttime you were looking for
something to watch on a servicelike Netflix and you think about
the time it took you to findsomething to watch.
(22:29):
It probably isn't that muchtime, and we think about those
things because the problem is,if people take up too much time
looking for something to watch,they don't make any choice and
they move on.
It's sort of that plethora ofchoice problem.
When you give people too manyoptions, they don't make any and
they bounce right.
So in our case, we do.
One of our challenges is thecold start challenge Right now.
(22:51):
Up until now, keep in mind,we've only been up and running
for just over two years, sowe're still a pretty nascent
service, even though there's alot of impact in the audience
already.
It's still early days andNetflix has been around a long
time.
Their algorithms, they wereworking on all of that stuff
well before the Gen AI chapterstarted.
(23:11):
But, given all of that, whatwe're doing is we're trying to
sort of get there faster andsort of accelerate our steps
toward that vision of givingpeople even the best cold start
experience.
For example, if you saw an adon Facebook for a certain
original that we had out there,that should tell us something
(23:35):
that you're coming from, that adand we should deliver on that.
Once you get into this, thereshould be sort of a deferred
deep link experience that getsyou there, deep link experience
that gets you there.
And I think, as we look at 25in personal, in trying to really
super personalize theexperience, we have to build
those experiences out.
So what we're doing I mentionedthe channel grid earlier, right
(23:57):
, the old TV guide.
So a lot of the content when itwas originally made for TV.
Think about a piece of, thinkabout a novella.
Okay, in a novella, it has, youknow, a synopsis.
What's it about?
It's got the actors, it's gotthe year.
Maybe there's a rating for TV.
Now, right, it's got variouspieces of what we'll call
(24:18):
metadata.
The truth is, that's all youneeded for TV, but for streaming
you need much more nuanced andbroad metadata.
So what we've done recently iswe've taken all of our content,
run it through the largelanguage models to enrich in the
metadata.
So we've taken that metadataspecifically.
(24:39):
So not only in the streamingversion of this metadata that
we're enriching, not only are wegetting more of it, we're
getting more refined.
So, for example, instead ofjust the title, the synopsis,
the actors, et cetera.
You're getting other things likewarm summer day Oops, I didn't
mean to put the thumb up thereWarm summer day.
(25:00):
We're talking things like is itaction?
Is there violence?
Is there gunshots?
Is there romance?
Is there a fast car chase?
Right, were there sharks in theocean?
Right?
I'm making all this up.
If you can aggregate all ofthis and sort of extrapolate to
hey, this content asset reallyhas 30 pieces of metadata.
(25:20):
Now we apply that through thewhole catalog and now we can
better cross-pollinate withvectors that one piece of
content is similar to anotherpiece of content.
Therefore, we get much, muchbetter about what we can
recommend for you.
So what we have right now inour system is a recommended for
you row Netflix today, theentire experience is kind of
(25:42):
recommended for you.
We have a row, but our nextstep in 2025 is to personalize
the entire experience so thatit's you know, we know where you
came from, why you're here.
If we know you're part of yourgame day, gary, and you're just
for the soccer, we should giveyou just a straight up soccer
interface, right?
We shouldn't get in the way ofthat, and that's what we're
(26:02):
striving to do as we go forwardto 2025.
I give you all this because Ithink you know, from a product
perspective, it's so interestingand I was talking to my team
recently about this.
It's look, it's.
It's a big accomplishment, Ithink, to build and launch this
streaming service in thetimeframe that we did.
We basically did it in ninemonths, which I think is a
(26:25):
record.
I think it might be a record.
We did it in nine months tolaunch the AVOD service.
Three months later we launchedthe SVOD service.
So there was a certain amountof muscle memory we had to build
up to do that quickly and, bythe way, all these people didn't
work here yet.
This is another interesting partof the journey was there was
some Univision people, someTelevisa people.
Another interesting part of thejourney was there was some
(26:45):
Univision people, some Televisapeople.
There was the original VIX,which was an older video,
smaller video service.
There was a handful of peoplefrom there that I hired.
The rest I hired like 300people like in the course of 90
days.
I just called everybody I knewthat knew something about video
and brought them here, whetherit was friends from Disney,
friends I worked with on videoat Facebook.
I built out Vivo years ago, themusic video service.
(27:07):
So people from there came andjoined and we all joined forces
and we marched at this.
My point about saying all thatisn't to brag that you know we
did it in such a short amount oftime.
Although I think that's prettycool, it's that our job as
product people is even morechallenged and more refined as
we go into this next chapter.
(27:27):
Because, before you're building, all the basic things, the
feature sets that you know everyvideo streaming service has,
right, when you build a newstreaming service, you don't
want to build it too dissimilarthan anything else because
there's conventions people areused to as consumers.
They know what interfaces looklike.
You know, when you launch thestreaming service, there's that
(27:50):
thing at the very top thatrotates.
It's the hero where people putthe most important stuff of the
day.
Then there's like all theserows that are sorted in some way
, right.
You know that there's search.
You know that there's identity.
You know that there'srecommendations.
You know that there's profiles.
You know that there'srecommendations.
You know that there's profiles.
You know that there's mobiledownloads on the mobile side.
You know that there's all thesefeatures, right?
We've been swinging at thisparody stuff and I'll give you
(28:13):
another example Like you got tobuild features so that when
people feel like they want tocancel, you got to make it so
that they can cancel without toodifficult a time, but you want
to be able to remind them on theway.
Are you sure you want to cancel?
So you start buildingcancel-save tactics.
Like you start showing imagesof the things that they watched
and that you know that theyliked.
(28:33):
Like, are you sure you want toleave this?
But you don't want to get inthe way with it, obviously, but
you want to be conscious aboutthose things.
So we built a lot of thosethings.
We launched a lot ofpartnerships.
You know whereby, for example,easy in Mexico.
It's a big cable company.
If you're an Easy subscriber,you have access to VIX for a
period of time complimentaryRight and I think that's that's
(28:57):
great, because it helps peoplelive in both sides of the world
the cable world and thestreaming world at the same time
, wherever they'd like to live.
But anyway, coming back to myprimary point, here, though, our
job as product people actuallygets harder.
That was just execution.
That was raw, grinded outexecution that we just did the
(29:19):
last few years.
Now we're turning the page intoa new inflection of being much
more heady, much moredata-driven, much more refined,
much smarter about what we build, for who over what period of
time.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
So, as you try to refine your product, what are
some of those living indicatorsthat you are using to measure
success?
An example you gave before ismaybe the time that it takes for
a user to find something thatthey want to watch.
What else is there that leadsto success for you?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah, we look at.
One of our North Star KPIs iswhat we call total streaming
hours.
So internally we refer to thatas TSH for short.
And the TSH is a primary KPIbecause it stretches over both
parts of our business, our AVODand our S-Mod subscription side
(30:15):
as well.
So total streaming hours is oneFor the ad business.
That's important because themore hours streamed, the more ad
inventory there is right andthe more your ad sales force can
go out and sell, sell ads, theon the SVOD side we look at, you
know, new subscriber growth.
(30:35):
We look at churn Right.
So when a given product manager,you know, puts a feature on the
table for us to consider doing,what happens is it goes through
that scrutiny.
Their job is to write a productbrief and in that product brief
they have to be very, veryclear, upfront about what it is
(30:58):
they're trying to build again,for which audience and to what
end.
What is the outcome?
So I design my teams to buildtoward the outcome.
So I split my productmanagement team, for example,
between growth and engagement.
So on the growth side it's allabout getting subscribers in or
(31:19):
just going all out and drivingtotal streaming hours.
The engagement side is moreabout like, okay, now that we've
got this subscriber or thisviewer, how do we keep them?
So this person starts to thinkabout and this is as we go into
2025.
Now it's not just aboutbuilding a better search feature
, it's about building featuresthat get people.
(31:44):
For example, there's aframework we use and I call this
I'm sure other product peoplehave similar frameworks RFE,
recency, frequency andengagement.
Recency is how recent thatperson has been here.
Frequency, how often do theycome, and engagement, that's how
much they watch, how much timethey spend, and what you find is
(32:06):
you end up with levers that youcan pull as you think about the
world that way.
Right, and, for example, if youwanted to drive frequency,
getting people to come back moreoften, you start to think about
strategies to do that.
In our case, we're buildingthings like the follow model so
(32:26):
that you can follow teams,actors, shows.
Certainly, we infer that, butwhen people make those
deterministic decisions, that'seven stronger signal and we can,
in those flows, encourage themto opt in for push notifications
.
Right, a lot of times peopledon't want to have be pushed
notified because it's too noisy,but if we could tighten the
(32:50):
signal right and give you thenotifications on just the soccer
that you care about, or justthe season two of that original
series that you fell in lovewith right this past year.
That's more signal and we'regoing to bring you back in.
So you start to think aboutstrategies around that.
You know we we're starting tolook at, you know, the notion of
short form like what does shortform mean?
(33:13):
What, if you know what?
What can we do if we had agreat soccer tournament?
There's a lot of great assetslike highlights, right, we all.
If you're a sports fan, youlove highlights.
You watch them almost every dayprobably.
Why not have a surface for that?
So we're contemplating in themobile and the mobile interface,
at least to the mobile surface,having those kinds of
(33:34):
interfaces.
So we think a lot aboutinterfaces.
We think about this is whereall of the personalization comes
into play.
Right, if we know we want todrive more engagement with you
in the RFE framework.
We're thinking about the E here.
We might try freshening up ourinterface, because you might be
(33:55):
tired of coming and seeing thesame old thing.
We might try and you've seenNetflix be masterful with this
by using alternative key art onthe content tiles right.
Sometimes you'll see the samething as you've seen before, but
with a different piece of artthat might be more enticing to
you.
We want to get smarter aboutall those things.
So subscription growth, totalstreaming hours, churn
(34:20):
mitigation, all those things thelevers being the RFE levers,
those are very, very smartplaces for us to play.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
I want to talk more about pricing, because you
mentioned that your ad tier isfree, which is relatively unique
compared to the ad-supportedtiers with Netflix or Disney+.
They still charge less than anad-free tier, but they still
charge.
So what's your rationale behindoffering a fully free tier?
Speaker 2 (34:49):
What we've come to know about our audience is
there's a cohort, there's asegment that probably will never
buy.
They will never subscribe,right.
There's a sort of a.
There's an economic you knowimpact here, and if you spend
(35:11):
time in, you know parts of likeMexico or Latin America and I
always pressure test this when Igo to Mexico, you know, and I
talk to people about it just tosee have they heard of VIX?
And sometimes what I find outis you know, there's people that
share their internet servicewith other people on the block
(35:33):
or they kind of go in on oneaccount, right.
And so you know there'saudience.
We just have to be mindful thatthere's audiences that may
never pay because it may nevermake sense, right, that's just
not clearly an option.
There's other audiences thatactually will pay but they won't
(35:54):
pay with a credit card becausemost of their bills they pay for
with that week's cash, right.
So there's a convenience storein Mexico called OXO.
It's sort of like analogous inthe US to like a 7-Eleven sort
of store.
You know people go in there,maybe pay their cell phone bill,
you know, buy some stuff forthe weekend and you know they
(36:20):
can buy VIX now and they go homeand activate it on their device
and it runs out, and then theygo back to top up later whenever
they're ready to do that right.
So we have to be much moremindful about our addressable
market, and as we've come toknow our market, we've come to
know that there's a certainsegment that will likely never
(36:41):
upgrade and we're cool with that.
That is why we have a pure Avonservice is to cater to that,
and so that doesn't mean thatwe'll never have one of those
combined services that's premiumwith ads.
We're contemplating that, justlike everybody else.
It's becoming a normal thing.
But you have to be mindful aswell not to confuse the
(37:06):
marketplace.
So I'll give you a good exampleof this.
When we we first launched VIX umand gosh, it was in March of 22
, the AVOD service.
We launched it.
It was off to the races.
A bunch of people jumped on,started watching, and then three
(37:26):
months later, we launched asubscription tier.
At the time we called it VIXPlus.
So we had VIX and VIX Plus andwe kind of had two different
marketing campaigns.
You had the one campaigns goingout to acquire AVOD viewers and
you had another campaign goingout acquiring SVOD viewers with
the more premium content and thepremium soccer games and blah,
blah blah.
(37:46):
And what we learned the hard waya few months in is we confused
that AVOD audience.
A lot of them assumed thatthing they started falling in
love with just a few months agooh, they're charging for that
now.
So we created for ourselves abunch of confusion in the
marketplace.
So that led us down a road ofsaying, okay, let's take a step
(38:10):
back.
We're trying to be all thingsto all audiences, to find our
market fit and see what ouropportunity is here.
We think we know what it lookslike, but we're learning nuanced
aspects of it.
So let's take a step back.
And what we decided to do andthis is our head of marketing,
also from Spain, roger Soleil.
(38:31):
He came up with this thing thathe called the one brand
strategy that we put in play,which is the one brand strategy
which is okay, we're just goingto market as VIX now.
That's all we're going to talkabout.
We're not going to do the VIXand VIX plus.
We're going to be verystraightforward.
We're going to acquire peopleinto the AVOD tier.
There'll be some campaigns onthe SVOD tier, but the
(38:51):
difference is we're thinkingabout it as a tier rather than a
different thing.
So with this mindset you go andyou use, you create this funnel
, you bring people into the Avodservice.
Some percentage of them you'regoing to convert into SVOD
subscriber, right, and thathelps your cost of customer
acquisition because you'remining among your own audience
(39:14):
and if they do churn, they'reonly going back to the Avod
service, right, so you're notlosing them forever.
So that's kind of some of themaybe some of the madness, the
rhyme to the reason here, and Ithink you know that has served
us well.
So at this point in time, wehave VIX and we have VIX premium
inside.
But see, here's the thinginside.
(39:35):
But see, here's the thing Nowthat we're getting smarter about
our personas and we're startingto know and recognize the
patterns and the propensities ofthe people that are not likely
to subscribe, what we can do iswe can ratchet down all the
lifecycle comms that we headtheir way with right we could
(39:55):
give them.
We could do more to drive themback into the service from a
frequency standpoint, right,rather than trying to upgrade
them all the time, because I'msure their experience is coming
into the service, we're going touse a tool like Braze to do an
in-app alert and block them,right.
They're trying to watchsomething we got, this thing
they got to cancel out of.
(40:15):
We're trying to pitch them onthis upgrade to this VIX premium
.
Let's stop doing that, right.
Let's not do that to them.
Let's make them happier.
Let's increase the LTV for themas AVOD viewers and be happy
with that, and let them be happywith that and focus on other
(40:35):
personas with the heavylifecycle upgrade mechanism.
See what I mean.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Totally.
It sounds like the Spotify orYouTube pricing model, where
they still offer a forever freetier, where they monetize
through ads, while offering somepremium tiers for people that
do not want to have ads right.
Which?
is different than maybe howNetflix or Disney Plus or the
streaming service are monetizingtoday, and I want to ask you
(41:01):
about the competitive landscape,because it seems like you are
competing for attention, andsome of that attention can be
spent on media and entertainmentstreaming services, but it can
also be spent on social media,music platforms.
How are you thinking about thecompetitive landscape and how
you're trying to get a biggershare of that?
Speaker 2 (41:20):
It's really YouTube more than anything for us is
what we see, as our you know,and even back when I was at
Facebook, I was thinking in timespent terms, right, and so I've
been doing that for a while andthinking about what does it
mean and what does it look liketo drive time spent and what
kinds of things do you do toenrich in that, to make it worth
(41:43):
somebody spending more time?
And I apply some of theframeworks that I used way back
when when I was putting the newsin the newsfeed at Facebook and
that's a for better or worsething, because there was draft
on impact from that.
But I try to think about whatare the things that are going to
bring people uniquely here, andwhat happens is we all know in
(42:09):
YouTube it's the wide world ofeverything.
Everything is there.
But what you don't have there isa 27 minute novella per se.
In some cases you do, but notnot, not commonly, and some.
Well, what we'll do is we'llleverage those channels to drop
shorter clips and highlights anddrive people into the platform.
Before, before VIX was here, wehad a bunch of websites and
(42:33):
apps.
Basically every TV company hasdigital right.
They have apps and websites.
We have those too.
And so there's, there's, thereare whole teams that build these
websites and apps and nurturethem and bring people in with
for page views and sampling.
So it's it's it's the old, it'sthe old adage of like get people
into the sampling processeasily and let them, let them
(42:55):
find their way into the longerform edition of that.
So VIX is really today thelonger form edition of that.
Time will tell if we can cracksome code on maybe some shorter
form like content.
It's tricky, because what youdon't want to do is duplicate
what you're doing on a YouTuberight, because otherwise what's
(43:17):
the point?
You want to be where people areand you want people to come
somewhere else if it makes sense.
So in this case, we've beenlaser focused on longer form
content.
I think our thoughts aroundshorter form is we're trying to
(43:38):
balance the discipline of doingbringing people here for the
reason we know they want to comehere with creating new habits
and new engagement models, rightLike if, if I, if I knew, if I
knew that VIX had something Ican consume at a glance while
(43:58):
I'm waiting in line at thegrocery store, I might go there
and I might spend that, so wemight be able to buy some time
spent in that way, in thatdimension of short-form
consumption, if we can deliveron the unique value, the unique
content that we have.
So we're thinking a lot aboutthat, but by and large, we're
(44:21):
thinking it's more about YouTubeas our competitor, more than
any other streamer per se.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, and as you talk more about expansion, I think
about companies like the NewYork Times and how they were
able to expand now into cookingrecipes or video games.
Netflix is also toying withvideo games or even fitness
programming.
So I think different platformsare mastering one format and
trying to get into other formats.
(44:47):
So curious to know how you goabout preventing your core and
keeping that identity that makesyou unique, while also testing
the ground, knowing that yourstakes are very high, right,
like when you run an experiment.
It's not about getting a fewmore users.
We're talking about the nexthundred million users.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
That's right, and I think we're still in that kind
of table stakes mode.
So, while it's very tempting tothink about things like
in-stream shopping, betting,watch parties, you know, all of
those kinds of things, you knowbecause we do this reality show,
(45:24):
sort of a Big Brother-likething called La Casa de los
Famosos, and it runs for likeseveral weeks at a time, 24-7.
You put a bunch of you knowcelebrities into a house and
what happens?
And people come in at all hoursof the day and night to watch
this thing and you can't helpbut wonder would some people
(45:45):
want to watch that together?
Right?
And is there someco-consumption?
Is there some Twitch-like modelthere?
Right, that might make sense,makes sense.
And so we have to balance.
You know, do we spend thisquarter leading up to the next
La Casa de los Famosos onhardening the platform so that
we can handle the volume and thequality of experience is good,
(46:10):
or do we start dabbling into theTwitch-like watch party?
You know segments, it'stempting, but I try to
prioritize.
Every quarter we sort ofreprioritize and reorder what
we're prioritizing, but whattends to happen is performance.
Platform performance alwaysremains number one, because you
(46:30):
don't have anything else.
Without that, right, peopledon't have any patience.
So we've been performing throughthings like La Casa, through
things like we did the World Cup, and at the time we had just
launched.
Six months later we had donethe World Cup, we had like 3
million concurrent viewers, andso what's different here is I'm
(46:54):
in charge of product but I'malso in charge of engineering,
which is kind of a pattern yousee at media companies.
They used to have them asseparate roles and I think with
just the changes and the waythings are, they sort of started
.
They combine them when they can, and so in my case, when I took
the job, I took both of thoseresponsibilities, as well as
design and operations, so it'sall one.
(47:14):
The beauty of that is I canharmonize those functions and
they're less of a matrix becauseeverybody's kind of one family
and they all take care of eachother, so we can rally behind
things like that, andperformance and scale is kind of
one of those paramount thingsthat we can never take our eye
off of and take for granted.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
That's such a good reminder that sometimes the next
big thing is doing what you do,but better.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Yeah, absolutely A hundred percent, and the
dividends that you can see bydoing that.
And we just are in the processof updating all of our video
players because, especially onmobile, we're about to launch
mobile downloads for the firsttime in the next month and we
(48:03):
needed some, some enhancementsto our player.
Um, in the quality improvementswe're able to make with our
player, guess what?
We're starting to see the totalstreaming hours go up and to
the right right and it's likewhat's different.
Oh, we put a new player inthat's more performant.
It's very basic, but it turnsout when it works people use it
(48:26):
Totally.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
Less flashy maybe than launching a new category or
app, but ultimately it'sdriving the success that you're
looking for.
And just to wrap up thisconversation, michael, I want to
repeat one of your hot takeshere.
You said product managers aretoo utopian.
Can you elaborate more on thatplease?
Speaker 2 (48:44):
Okay, well, to be clear, I don't think every
product manager is too utopian,but it's a tendency.
It's a tendency of a lot ofproduct managers and I've seen
it over and over again and itkind of goes like this you know,
in the pure form of productmanagement, in the discipline,
in the craft of it, right, weall have these first principles,
right, we all have these rulesthat we've accumulated, from
(49:09):
whether it's over time in theyears, on things you've built.
Or, if you're newer into thecraft, maybe you've seen, you've
gone to one of your classes,your courses right, all of these
things are happening.
And maybe you're newer into thecraft, maybe you've seen,
you've gone to one of yourclasses, your courses, right,
all of these things arehappening.
And maybe you're newer to it.
But you start to acquire thisknowledge base of what it means
to do this the right way and inits purest form, you say, okay,
(49:33):
what's the outcome we're lookingfor?
Okay, what are the three thingswe might do to get to that
outcome?
Okay, now it's time to write aproduct brief.
What am I going to build overwhat period of time?
It's aligned with that strategyand drives that outcome.
Well, given, I've done productin different companies now in
tech companies, in my ownstartups that I've started, in
(49:56):
big media companies, in bigbanks.
I've seen it all thesedifferent ways right, and what
happens is if you're doingproduct in a pure tech company,
you got a better shot of livingthat utopian dream right.
You're going to get more ofthat there than anywhere else,
because guess what those pureplay tech companies else.
(50:19):
Because guess what those pureplay tech companies they're not
thinking of draft on impactsacross ecosystems and audiences
so much because they'retechnology companies.
And you saw that with socialmedia.
You're seeing it again with GenAI.
By the way, it's anotherinflection of that challenge.
If you go to a media company,you don't have the luxury of
thinking about it all that way,because what happens is there's
(50:41):
a lot of stakeholders, there's alot of people you got to get
buy-in from.
You got to bring people along,you got to go along with them.
You got to find some places inthe middle.
You got budgets that are goingto be tighter than they are in
tech companies.
Oftentimes, especially now,there's different constraints.
So earlier I talked about theband and the constraints about
being in 1988.
(51:02):
It's very similar to that.
It's like, okay, you only haveso much to spend.
Whereas in Disney+, I thinkwhen I was there probably had
thousands of engineers, I have250 engineers.
Can't think about the world thesame way I did then, right,
it's a very different set ofconstraints.
So you're not going to havepersonalization overnight, for
(51:27):
example.
So if I would have opened up andsaid I wanted to launch it
personalized and nail that coldstart problem at the jump, no
way was that going to bepossible.
I would have been too utopian.
I wouldn't have had time tolaunch all the different
distribution partnerships thatwe had to launch or launch on
all the different tvs that wehad to launch, right, I wouldn't
have had time to do all thosethings.
So I think I've learned thehard way that wherever I go, I
(51:50):
can bring the stuff, the, thegrit, the product.
But I got to apply itdifferently depending on what
the company is, who's there,what their background and
experience is.
You know, a lot of times I knowmy boss here a lot of times.
He came from Viacom so he wasused to.
(52:10):
You know, product and techbeing like this, this service
center, where he was the client.
That's a very different dynamicthan what you're going to be as
a product manager at Meta.
If you're the product manager atMeta and you're launching a
feature and you need thedistribution team to launch some
(52:31):
partnerships, you enlist them.
They're working for you on thisthing.
Or if you need some productmarketing, they're coming to
work for you.
So the tables kind of turn andyou have to be willing to play
it with those dynamics.
Which is why I say a lot oftimes, people that worked with
me in tech companies, they bothwouldn't have the patience, the
(52:51):
nerve or the interest to do itat a media company.
The nerve or the interest to doit at a media company, right,
it's a different set of thingsand I see it's funny I tell
different product managers thatwork for me now I'm like, look,
the good news is, yes, you gotthose constraints, but the
trade-off is you get to work inthis with some of the best
(53:13):
content that so many people inthe world want to see every day.
Right, you don't get that everyday in a tech company.
Speaker 1 (53:21):
Michael, thank you so much for your time.
It's been wonderful to do areal deep dive into how you're
building product for a mediacompany.
Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
Carlos, it's great to see you.
One of your hot takes here.
You said product managers aretoo utopian.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Okay, well, to be clear, I don't think every
product manager is too utopian,but it's a tendency.
That's a very different dynamicthan what you're going to be as
a product manager at Meta.
People ask me what's the numberone thing you look for?
And it is actually curiosity.
A million percent.
It's a big accomplishment tobuild and launch this streaming
service in the timeframe that wedid.
We basically did it in ninemonths, which I think is a
(00:26):
record.
Hey, this content asset reallyhas 30 pieces of metadata.
Now we apply that through thewhole catalog and now we can
better cross pollinate withvectors that one piece of
content is similar to anotherpiece of content.
Rfu, recency, frequency andengagement.
Recency is how recent thatperson has been here.
Frequency, how often do theycome, and engagement that's how
(00:48):
much they watch, how much timethey spend.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Hey, this is Carlos's AI voice clone.
He's the CEO of Product Schooland the host on the Product
Podcast.
Let me introduce today's guestfirst.
Michael Kurda is the ChiefProduct and Technology Officer
at Televisa Univision, theworld's leading Spanish-language
media company, reaching 125million Spanish speakers daily
across the US and Latin America.
Two years ago, they launched VX, a consumer streaming platform
(01:15):
competing with US-based giantslike Netflix and Disney+.
Vix has already surpassed 50million global monthly active
users, driven by the world'slargest library of Spanish
language content, includingmajor soccer rights like the
World Cup, european Championshipand Champions League.
Michael's career is equallyimpressive.
He launched Disney Plus as VPof Product at Disney, led
(01:37):
Apple's first credit card as CPOat Goldman Sachs and worked
directly with Mark Zuckerberg atMeta.
At VIX, michael leads productmanagement, design and
engineering.
He leverages AI to enrichmetadata, improve content
recommendations and solve thecold start problem, all while
steering VIX towardprofitability by late 2024.
In this episode, we coverpersonalizing content for
(01:59):
millions across 19 countries,using AI and large language
models for metadata and UX,balancing traditional TV habits
with modern streaming.
Scaling a streaming service injust nine months, targeting
personas with cultural insights.
What stood out to me wasMichael's approach to product
management.
He draws parallels betweenbuilding products and his
passions for music, yoga andcooking.
(02:20):
His emphasis on curiosity asthe top trait for product
managers brings a freshperspective to talent
acquisition in tech.
Let's dive in.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Welcome to the show, michael.
Thank you, carlos.
It's great to be here, michael,let's jump into it.
I see that you were a yogateacher and opened up a yoga
school around 20 years ago.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah, wow, it's been 20 years, but that is true.
I opened up a yoga schoolcalled the Yoga Company and it
was interesting because in thosedays yoga and business weren't
cool to mix those two things.
The idea behind the company wasto make it about company as in
people that was what they call adouble entendre, the use of the
(03:04):
word company, right, peoplethat was what they call a double
entendre, the use of the wordcompany, right.
But I tried to make it like anyproduct person doing a yoga
thing would do.
I tried to make it accessibleto the audience.
In those days in the East SanFrancisco Bay, yoga just wasn't
accessible.
It was always you either got itin a gym, which usually wasn't
great yoga or authentic, got itin a gym, which usually wasn't
(03:27):
great yoga or authentic.
Or you got it in a yoga studiothat was in the back behind a
building up some stairs, in avery quiet, dark space where
everybody was not saying hello,you're welcome, right, and
everybody was meditating whenyou walk in.
So nothing was inviting.
So I tried to create something.
I put a yoga school like in ashopping center.
It was next to like anAlbertson shopping center,
across from a McDonald's, nextto the CVS, right, you couldn't
(03:51):
miss it and you know, we broughtyoga to about 5,000 new yoga
students and exposed it to themand I had a really good time
doing that.
I could only do it for a fewyears because I did it at the
time that we referred to forthose of us that were around
back then as the nuclear winterin Silicon Valley.
This was just after the dot-combubble burst and sort of right
(04:13):
after 9-11.
In that time period, a passionproject and trying to do
something that felt good and wasgood for health and good for
people and wellness.
And I've been a practitionerever since, although I don't
have the school anymore.
But yes, that was a wonderful,wonderful experience and I see
(04:34):
the background.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
You have plenty of instruments there, so I'm very
curious to know how you wereable to connect your practices,
your passions outside of work,also to the work that you do.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah.
So music I've been playing allmy life and I've only been a
product guy for whatever 25years.
But I realized that they'reboth one in the same.
Being a yoga teacher wassimilar.
Being I love to cook that isvery similar.
(05:06):
It's all about what to build forwho over what period of time,
and you could map that acrossall of those areas, right?
If you're a songwriter, it'slike what song are you writing,
who are you writing it for andwhen do you want to release it?
What does it mean to release itand give it a life of its own?
It's just like a productrelease, right?
You're very deterministic,you're very methodical.
It's just like a productrelease right, you're very
deterministic, you're verymethodical, right?
All of these things lend toeach other, and so over the
(05:34):
years I've managed to do bothand weave them in and out.
And you know I have a Latinjazz group called the Yellow
House Orchestra.
You know we've put many recordsout.
You can see them out there onSpotify and over YouTube and
things.
We've put many records out.
You can see them out there onSpotify and over YouTube and
things.
But I also have a pop projectcalled the Sunday Review, which
is this is interesting as aproduct guy and any of the
product people listening, thisis a total product guy's move on
(05:54):
a band, right.
So during the pandemic, the guywho's my designer right now and
he worked with me beforedesigner, his name is Chris
Phillips, he's in New York, I'mjust outside of San Francisco.
So during the pandemic wethought, hey, let's write some
songs together and we startedwriting them and this was the
constraint we created, as if itwas 1988 still.
(06:17):
But we're the same people.
But we knew now what we wouldknow then, right.
So we have the same level ofmusic theory and understanding.
In 88, when we're at highschool, at least he and I were.
What would we have writtentogether if we were in the band?
And that's the whole project.
So we're writing these songsand they're deliberately, with
(06:39):
guilty pleasure, right, they'redeliberately from those times
and what we get is somethingthat's that's very much, uh, you
know, steely dan, ish, hollownotes, ish and everything in
that ilk, um.
But it's super fun because wecan get away with it, because
it's deliberate, once again,very deterministic, right, about
the craft, um, and we just wejust have a ball with it.
(07:02):
That band's based in new yorkcity.
So whenever I go to new yorkcity I play with it.
And that band's based in NewYork City, so whenever I go to
New York City I play with thatband.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
There's something about successful professionals
and their level of curiosity,all these incredible product
leaders that I know.
They all have passions and theyfind ways to find time for
those passions because that'salso part of their life, and
then you end up ways to connectin those passions in unexpected
ways.
But ultimately, I think, havingthat inherent curiosity, it's
(07:29):
very important.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
You know, when I look and evaluate product managers,
whether I'm hiring some orwhether I'm looking at my own
team, people ask me what's thenumber one thing you look for?
And it is actually curiosity, amillion percent.
Because if you're not curious,you're not necessarily realizing
(07:51):
that you don't know what youdon't know.
And if you can accept that youdon't know what you don't know,
you can go hunting, you can goon a journey and you could find
things you could pour throughyour data right.
You could pour through youraudience right.
Um, we were just doing thatvery recently.
We're just coming up with aproject, um, with where I work
(08:12):
right now at televisa univision,where we're looking at our
audience and we're like tryingto determine, with the data we
have, who are the personas inthat audience with.
If you know what a persona isamong your audience, you can
start to double down on theirlike behaviors, their needs,
their mindsets and therefore youcan build for them.
(08:32):
And in our case we're in 19different countries.
So it's a little wild becauseit's not all created equal.
Our US market, because we doSpanish language video streaming
right.
So in the US there's a verydifferent Hispanic audience than
there is in, say, colombia orin Mexico.
Those are distinct audiences,so we have to be mindful of the
(08:55):
regions and mindful of ourcontent catalog as it relates to
those regions.
You know, in the US we have,for example, one of the personas
that's very highly engaged.
We call this person and this isjust working names, right, so
don't take it too seriously butstraightforward, sophia.
And Sophia is someone thatshe's a single mom and she wants
(09:16):
things to just work.
She doesn't want to spend timegetting her TV dialed into the
right input right, it's just gotto turn on and work.
She doesn't have time to searchfor something In her journey.
She's got to find somethingquickly to put it on and have
that entertainment start.
And this is somebody thatbinges on our originals we have
a whole bunch of originals butgenerally busy with work and
(09:38):
family and really needstechnology and any kind of
subscription plans to bestraightforward, right, that
stuff just has to work.
So when you think about and, bythe way, straightforward,
sophia, as we call her, isbilingual.
She's in the US, she just aswell watches things on other
streaming services.
It's just that she comes to usfor specific things that
(10:00):
resonate from the country thatshe comes from, right, or the
heritage that she has thatresonate from the country that
she comes from right, or theheritage that she has.
So, anyway, what I'm getting tois personas, and being persona
aware is one of the criticalaspects of the product journey,
because you're digging into youraudience, you're understanding,
again, behaviors, needs andmindsets, and only then can you
(10:21):
know what to build for who, overwhat period.
I might say in this next threemonths I'm going to roll out a
dozen features that are gearedtoward this persona, knowing
very well that I'm going toleave another persona let's call
him Game Day Gary who comesjust to watch soccer.
So, a bunch of soccer, and Garyjust comes to watch soccer.
(10:44):
Then he leaves, comes back andguess what?
Gary doesn't even speak Spanishproperly.
That's, that's what we'relearning, because we know that
his keyboard is, is, is in, isin English.
So we got to.
We have to think again verydeterministically about what we
built for a straightforwardSophia versus a game day Gary.
A game day Gary.
You know you might think as aproduct person, you might think,
oh, sophia versus a game dayGary.
(11:04):
A game day Gary.
You might think as a productperson, you might think, oh, gee
, you might come up with aproduct SKU that's just
sports-based or that's justseasonal, or you might go out on
a limb and say let's targetgame day, gary, with an annual
plan, that way he doesn't churnout in the off seasons.
(11:24):
You see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Totally Well, let's start with just giving us an
overview of your company,Televisa Univision I know it's
huge and specifically what youdo as a chief product and
technology officer.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, so this company has been around for decades as
two different companies, soTelevisa in Mexico and Univision
in the United States.
So when I was like a little kid, right, I lived with my
grandparents and they were.
They had come from Mexico, froma place called Morelia in
Michoacan, which I'm sure Lauraknows, and my father was born in
(11:59):
the United States, inCalifornia, and then I came
along in the 70s and you knowwhen my dad's era were born.
What's interesting is they weretrying to become more American
right, so there was goingEnglish first, they were leaning
more into English and so by thetime I came around, everybody's
speaking English.
But my grandparents are stillspeaking Spanish, right, and so,
and everything they had on TVat the time was Spanish
(12:23):
television and Spanish languagetelevision, and it was called.
It was a network called SINCanal 34, los Angeles, and I'll
never forget that, and it wasall the novellas, it was all the
lucha libre, the wrestling.
You know the early days ofwrestling.
I think I first saw like Andrethe Giant there before I saw him
on USA or whoever acquired itlater, before the Ed McMahon era
(12:47):
, I think, and I saw all thisstuff and it was a memory and of
course, my grandparents passedaway and so forth and I had been
working on Disney Plus.
I was the head of product forDisney Plus for a few years and
I was recruited into Univisionjust before they merged with
(13:08):
Televisa.
So Televisa a bunch of big TVstations and studios in Mexico.
Univision a bunch of studiosand TV stations in the US, one
of them being SAE Enit.
That became Univision part.
That became, that becameUnivision.
And so now the company's mergedafter it, just after I joined,
and merged to combine content,catalogs and assets and
(13:31):
audiences and markets and form abigger company and build a
streaming service.
You know, knowing, knowing thatstreaming is sort of the next
inflection in consumerentertainment and consumption,
we knew we needed to buildsomething very compelling and
very, very deliberate, targetedtoward our market.
And as people were cuttingcords and linear right, we're
(13:54):
there with streaming.
So my area is an area we callVIX, v-i-x that's the name of
the streaming service and it's afree, ad supported service with
a premium tier right.
So on the free service, whichin the business, we call AVOD,
which is, you know, advertisingvideo on demand, although we
(14:19):
have some live as well.
So it's not really AVOD, it'sAVOD plus.
So on the VOD side, video ondemand, we have 53,000 hours of
content ranging from likenovellas, original series and a
whole bunch of movies.
We have some channels and thisis interesting from a product
perspective too, because a lotof us as consumers tend to
(14:42):
consume, I think, video ondemand.
That's what Netflix gives us,right, a video on demand
interface.
In the markets we're in,there's a lot of people that are
cutting the cable cord andgoing right online and going to
streaming.
So we've built the interfacesthat they're used to seeing in
TV, which in the business, wecall the EPG electronic
(15:04):
programming grid.
It's an old school term, butthink about the last time you
turned on the TV guide right andyou saw the grid of channels.
You saw channel two, three,four and you saw the shows right
across the rows.
So we have a channels interface, an EPG interface, where we
have 84 in the US and 71, Ithink, now in Mexico.
And again it's all the samecontent, just the discovery
(15:28):
mechanism is different.
And then the interface is likeyou're flipping through the
channels and just putting onwhat you put on, versus in the
VOD environment you're like, oh,I want to go to this series and
this episode, right, those aretwo different journeys and we
get two different valuepropositions out there and we
can let our audience decide.
We do have 24-7 news.
We do have a whole bunch ofsports, a bunch of soccer
(15:51):
primarily Liga MX in Mexico,champions League, uefa a whole
bunch of soccer.
So we end up in the US gettinga lot of soccer fans, agnostic
of the language, which isinteresting, but of course in
Mexico we're kind of the home ofsoccer.
(16:11):
That's the AVOD side.
We also have a premium service,which in the US is $6.99 per
month, and in the premiumservice it's a whole bunch of
originals.
It's new, you know.
Think about the idea.
We've all become accustomed tothe Netflix service.
It's a whole bunch of originals.
It's new, you know.
Think about the idea We've allbecome accustomed to the Netflix
original right, or even theApple TV Plus original, et
cetera.
(16:32):
When I was at Disney, we hadoriginals.
We also have originals, andwhen we started VIX, we actually
hired a lot of people that hadbeen working on the Netflix
originals for Spanish language.
They were the first sort ofcontent team here, and so
there's a whole bunch of seriesthat we've got that, if you're
(16:53):
the Netflix type of viewer,these would resonate with you.
We launched some of these.
Some of them resonated, some ofthem didn't, right, this is how
you find, like in any product,product market fit, and ours is
not only with the interfaceslike I was getting at, with VOD
versus channels-based, but alsowith the content, and what we're
, I think, realizing is that alot of the content that
(17:16):
resonates most is the contentthat's closest to home.
Right, it's the content thatyou're not finding elsewhere.
In our case, you know we havesome originals around.
You know Maria Felix, we haveEl Mujer del Diablo, we have El
(17:37):
Show, which is all about theshow that was on in the 80s
called Paco Stanley.
It was a variety show and wehave a whole docu-series around
how that happened and how he wasassassinated and all this crazy
stuff, right?
So all that stuff resonates and, of course, the novellas is the
lion's share, that's thehighest watched type of content.
(18:02):
So what we're doing is we'rebringing this value proposition
uniquely, I think to ouraudience, and this is content
that they're not necessarilyfinding in other places, and
it's very intentional and it'svery, very close to home to the
audience.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yeah, and I think for some of the people who might be
listening, they don't speakSpanish they might not have an
idea of how big of a deal thisis Like.
The last statistic that I sawfrom your product was that there
are over 125 million Spanishspeakers connecting to your
product every day from the USand Latin America.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
Yeah, it's big.
It's big.
And, of course, when I was atDisney, when I left, we were at
about 100 million payingsubscribers.
That was ginormous.
Again, as a product personbecause I know this is a
product-based podcast you liketo think of what you do as
impactful, right, that's how Imake my sort of career choices.
(19:05):
I think about what is my impactability over time with a given
opportunity At Disney, we got to100 million paying subscribers.
I thought, okay, that wasphenomenal.
What's next?
And I just happened to berecruited into this opportunity
here and I thought, wow, tobring this to the audience in my
(19:25):
heritage.
If my grandparents were stillalive and still watching this
stuff, they would get a kick outof this.
I got to believe somewhere inheaven, they're proud, right.
So I have some purpose here andI think that we have that many
people viewing on a regularbasis.
We've hit the note right.
We've hit the high notes thatmatter and we've even, by the
(19:48):
way, we brought some older stuffback into the catalog, like
Chavo del Ocho, his big popularseries.
A whole bunch of stuff has comethrough that is for the older
generations it's nostalgia.
For the not so older it'sseeing something new but
(20:11):
familiar For families.
It's something that an extendedfamily can watch together.
As we look at our personas thatI mentioned earlier, we start
looking about what's the journeylike in the day in the life of
a given persona.
Sometimes those are extendedhouseholds, right, and you've
got the whole house gathering towatch something on Sunday night
, and that's the way Iremembered it as a kid too.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, so I want to dig deeper into that.
You talked about two differentpersonas the mom that has no
time to do other than work, andyou have the soccer fan.
But if you are talking about abig audience of hundreds of
millions of users, how do you goabout segmenting it, even at a
(20:56):
one-on-one level, so when theylog in into your platform, they
can find content that they aregoing to resonate with?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
It's an excellent question, and the way we're
looking at it is the way we'vegotten to our personas, by the
way, to begin with and we'restill pressure testing this it's
still new.
We're inferring this throughdata, through their viewing
history.
We have a thing called in theUS, on the US audience.
We have a household graph wherewe know a lot about a household
(21:24):
based on a whole bunch of datapoints that we've built out, and
we're inferring a lot of thisand we're clustering and we're
combining and we're making someassumptions as well, by the way.
So, anytime you do personas,you usually start with the data
and then you go to qualitativeresearch after that to really
validate.
We're kind of in that phase.
Now To your question, thoughhow do you target these personas
(21:49):
as they come into the platform?
And that's one place that'sprobably our biggest lever of
opportunity as I look at 2025,is personalizing this.
We all know, as consumers thatuse services like Netflix, that
it's ultra personalized.
Right, your interface is goingto be different than mine,
(22:09):
different than Laura's, etcetera, and that's great because
it's very targeted.
The service has gotten to knowus.
They've gone through at greatlengths to get that really tuned
.
If you think about the lasttime you were looking for
something to watch on a servicelike Netflix and you think about
the time it took you to findsomething to watch.
(22:29):
It probably isn't that muchtime, and we think about those
things because the problem is,if people take up too much time
looking for something to watch,they don't make any choice and
they move on.
It's sort of that plethora ofchoice problem.
When you give people too manyoptions, they don't make any and
they bounce right.
So in our case, we do.
One of our challenges is thecold start challenge Right now.
(22:51):
Up until now, keep in mind,we've only been up and running
for just over two years, sowe're still a pretty nascent
service, even though there's alot of impact in the audience
already.
It's still early days andNetflix has been around a long
time.
Their algorithms, they wereworking on all of that stuff
well before the Gen AI chapterstarted.
(23:11):
But, given all of that, whatwe're doing is we're trying to
sort of get there faster andsort of accelerate our steps
toward that vision of givingpeople even the best cold start
experience.
For example, if you saw an adon Facebook for a certain
original that we had out there,that should tell us something
(23:35):
that you're coming from, that adand we should deliver on that.
Once you get into this, thereshould be sort of a deferred
deep link experience that getsyou there, deep link experience
that gets you there.
And I think, as we look at 25in personal, in trying to really
super personalize theexperience, we have to build
those experiences out.
So what we're doing I mentionedthe channel grid earlier, right
(23:57):
, the old TV guide.
So a lot of the content when itwas originally made for TV.
Think about a piece of, thinkabout a novella.
Okay, in a novella, it has, youknow, a synopsis.
What's it about?
It's got the actors, it's gotthe year.
Maybe there's a rating for TV.
Now, right, it's got variouspieces of what we'll call
(24:18):
metadata.
The truth is, that's all youneeded for TV, but for streaming
you need much more nuanced andbroad metadata.
So what we've done recently iswe've taken all of our content,
run it through the largelanguage models to enrich in the
metadata.
So we've taken that metadataspecifically.
(24:39):
So not only in the streamingversion of this metadata that
we're enriching, not only are wegetting more of it, we're
getting more refined.
So, for example, instead ofjust the title, the synopsis,
the actors, et cetera.
You're getting other things likewarm summer day Oops, I didn't
mean to put the thumb up thereWarm summer day.
(25:00):
We're talking things like is itaction?
Is there violence?
Is there gunshots?
Is there romance?
Is there a fast car chase?
Right, were there sharks in theocean?
Right?
I'm making all this up.
If you can aggregate all ofthis and sort of extrapolate to
hey, this content asset reallyhas 30 pieces of metadata.
(25:20):
Now we apply that through thewhole catalog and now we can
better cross-pollinate withvectors that one piece of
content is similar to anotherpiece of content.
Therefore, we get much, muchbetter about what we can
recommend for you.
So what we have right now inour system is a recommended for
you row Netflix today, theentire experience is kind of
(25:42):
recommended for you.
We have a row, but our nextstep in 2025 is to personalize
the entire experience so thatit's you know, we know where you
came from, why you're here.
If we know you're part of yourgame day, gary, and you're just
for the soccer, we should giveyou just a straight up soccer
interface, right?
We shouldn't get in the way ofthat, and that's what we're
(26:02):
striving to do as we go forwardto 2025.
I give you all this because Ithink you know, from a product
perspective, it's so interestingand I was talking to my team
recently about this.
It's look, it's.
It's a big accomplishment, Ithink, to build and launch this
streaming service in thetimeframe that we did.
We basically did it in ninemonths, which I think is a
(26:25):
record.
I think it might be a record.
We did it in nine months tolaunch the AVOD service.
Three months later we launchedthe SVOD service.
So there was a certain amountof muscle memory we had to build
up to do that quickly and, bythe way, all these people didn't
work here yet.
This is another interesting partof the journey was there was
some Univision people, someTelevisa people.
Another interesting part of thejourney was there was some
(26:45):
Univision people, some Televisapeople.
There was the original VIX,which was an older video,
smaller video service.
There was a handful of peoplefrom there that I hired.
The rest I hired like 300people like in the course of 90
days.
I just called everybody I knewthat knew something about video
and brought them here, whetherit was friends from Disney,
friends I worked with on videoat Facebook.
I built out Vivo years ago, themusic video service.
(27:07):
So people from there came andjoined and we all joined forces
and we marched at this.
My point about saying all thatisn't to brag that you know we
did it in such a short amount oftime.
Although I think that's prettycool, it's that our job as
product people is even morechallenged and more refined as
we go into this next chapter.
(27:27):
Because, before you're building, all the basic things, the
feature sets that you know everyvideo streaming service has,
right, when you build a newstreaming service, you don't
want to build it too dissimilarthan anything else because
there's conventions people areused to as consumers.
They know what interfaces looklike.
You know, when you launch thestreaming service, there's that
(27:50):
thing at the very top thatrotates.
It's the hero where people putthe most important stuff of the
day.
Then there's like all theserows that are sorted in some way
, right.
You know that there's search.
You know that there's identity.
You know that there'srecommendations.
You know that there's profiles.
You know that there'srecommendations.
You know that there's profiles.
You know that there's mobiledownloads on the mobile side.
You know that there's all thesefeatures, right?
We've been swinging at thisparody stuff and I'll give you
(28:13):
another example Like you got tobuild features so that when
people feel like they want tocancel, you got to make it so
that they can cancel without toodifficult a time, but you want
to be able to remind them on theway.
Are you sure you want to cancel?
So you start buildingcancel-save tactics.
Like you start showing imagesof the things that they watched
and that you know that theyliked.
(28:33):
Like, are you sure you want toleave this?
But you don't want to get inthe way with it, obviously, but
you want to be conscious aboutthose things.
So we built a lot of thosethings.
We launched a lot ofpartnerships.
You know whereby, for example,easy in Mexico.
It's a big cable company.
If you're an Easy subscriber,you have access to VIX for a
period of time complimentaryRight and I think that's that's
(28:57):
great, because it helps peoplelive in both sides of the world
the cable world and thestreaming world at the same time
, wherever they'd like to live.
But anyway, coming back to myprimary point, here, though, our
job as product people actuallygets harder.
That was just execution.
That was raw, grinded outexecution that we just did the
(29:19):
last few years.
Now we're turning the page intoa new inflection of being much
more heady, much moredata-driven, much more refined,
much smarter about what we build, for who over what period of
time.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
So, as you try to refine your product, what are
some of those living indicatorsthat you are using to measure
success?
An example you gave before ismaybe the time that it takes for
a user to find something thatthey want to watch.
What else is there that leadsto success for you?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah, we look at.
One of our North Star KPIs iswhat we call total streaming
hours.
So internally we refer to thatas TSH for short.
And the TSH is a primary KPIbecause it stretches over both
parts of our business, our AVODand our S-Mod subscription side
(30:15):
as well.
So total streaming hours is oneFor the ad business.
That's important because themore hours streamed, the more ad
inventory there is right andthe more your ad sales force can
go out and sell, sell ads, theon the SVOD side we look at, you
know, new subscriber growth.
(30:35):
We look at churn Right.
So when a given product manager,you know, puts a feature on the
table for us to consider doing,what happens is it goes through
that scrutiny.
Their job is to write a productbrief and in that product brief
they have to be very, veryclear, upfront about what it is
(30:58):
they're trying to build again,for which audience and to what
end.
What is the outcome?
So I design my teams to buildtoward the outcome.
So I split my productmanagement team, for example,
between growth and engagement.
So on the growth side it's allabout getting subscribers in or
(31:19):
just going all out and drivingtotal streaming hours.
The engagement side is moreabout like, okay, now that we've
got this subscriber or thisviewer, how do we keep them?
So this person starts to thinkabout and this is as we go into
2025.
Now it's not just aboutbuilding a better search feature
, it's about building featuresthat get people.
(31:44):
For example, there's aframework we use and I call this
I'm sure other product peoplehave similar frameworks RFE,
recency, frequency andengagement.
Recency is how recent thatperson has been here.
Frequency, how often do theycome, and engagement, that's how
much they watch, how much timethey spend, and what you find is
(32:06):
you end up with levers that youcan pull as you think about the
world that way.
Right, and, for example, if youwanted to drive frequency,
getting people to come back moreoften, you start to think about
strategies to do that.
In our case, we're buildingthings like the follow model so
(32:26):
that you can follow teams,actors, shows.
Certainly, we infer that, butwhen people make those
deterministic decisions, that'seven stronger signal and we can,
in those flows, encourage themto opt in for push notifications
.
Right, a lot of times peopledon't want to have be pushed
notified because it's too noisy,but if we could tighten the
(32:50):
signal right and give you thenotifications on just the soccer
that you care about, or justthe season two of that original
series that you fell in lovewith right this past year.
That's more signal and we'regoing to bring you back in.
So you start to think aboutstrategies around that.
You know we we're starting tolook at, you know, the notion of
short form like what does shortform mean?
(33:13):
What, if you know what?
What can we do if we had agreat soccer tournament?
There's a lot of great assetslike highlights, right, we all.
If you're a sports fan, youlove highlights.
You watch them almost every dayprobably.
Why not have a surface for that?
So we're contemplating in themobile and the mobile interface,
at least to the mobile surface,having those kinds of
(33:34):
interfaces.
So we think a lot aboutinterfaces.
We think about this is whereall of the personalization comes
into play.
Right, if we know we want todrive more engagement with you
in the RFE framework.
We're thinking about the E here.
We might try freshening up ourinterface, because you might be
(33:55):
tired of coming and seeing thesame old thing.
We might try and you've seenNetflix be masterful with this
by using alternative key art onthe content tiles right.
Sometimes you'll see the samething as you've seen before, but
with a different piece of artthat might be more enticing to
you.
We want to get smarter aboutall those things.
So subscription growth, totalstreaming hours, churn
(34:20):
mitigation, all those things thelevers being the RFE levers,
those are very, very smartplaces for us to play.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
I want to talk more about pricing, because you
mentioned that your ad tier isfree, which is relatively unique
compared to the ad-supportedtiers with Netflix or Disney+.
They still charge less than anad-free tier, but they still
charge.
So what's your rationale behindoffering a fully free tier?
Speaker 2 (34:49):
What we've come to know about our audience is
there's a cohort, there's asegment that probably will never
buy.
They will never subscribe,right.
There's a sort of a.
There's an economic you knowimpact here, and if you spend
(35:11):
time in, you know parts of likeMexico or Latin America and I
always pressure test this when Igo to Mexico, you know, and I
talk to people about it just tosee have they heard of VIX?
And sometimes what I find outis you know, there's people that
share their internet servicewith other people on the block
(35:33):
or they kind of go in on oneaccount, right.
And so you know there'saudience.
We just have to be mindful thatthere's audiences that may
never pay because it may nevermake sense, right, that's just
not clearly an option.
There's other audiences thatactually will pay but they won't
(35:54):
pay with a credit card becausemost of their bills they pay for
with that week's cash, right.
So there's a convenience storein Mexico called OXO.
It's sort of like analogous inthe US to like a 7-Eleven sort
of store.
You know people go in there,maybe pay their cell phone bill,
you know, buy some stuff forthe weekend and you know they
(36:20):
can buy VIX now and they go homeand activate it on their device
and it runs out, and then theygo back to top up later whenever
they're ready to do that right.
So we have to be much moremindful about our addressable
market, and as we've come toknow our market, we've come to
know that there's a certainsegment that will likely never
(36:41):
upgrade and we're cool with that.
That is why we have a pure Avonservice is to cater to that,
and so that doesn't mean thatwe'll never have one of those
combined services that's premiumwith ads.
We're contemplating that, justlike everybody else.
It's becoming a normal thing.
But you have to be mindful aswell not to confuse the
(37:06):
marketplace.
So I'll give you a good exampleof this.
When we we first launched VIX umand gosh, it was in March of 22
, the AVOD service.
We launched it.
It was off to the races.
A bunch of people jumped on,started watching, and then three
(37:26):
months later, we launched asubscription tier.
At the time we called it VIXPlus.
So we had VIX and VIX Plus andwe kind of had two different
marketing campaigns.
You had the one campaigns goingout to acquire AVOD viewers and
you had another campaign goingout acquiring SVOD viewers with
the more premium content and thepremium soccer games and blah,
blah blah.
(37:46):
And what we learned the hard waya few months in is we confused
that AVOD audience.
A lot of them assumed thatthing they started falling in
love with just a few months agooh, they're charging for that
now.
So we created for ourselves abunch of confusion in the
marketplace.
So that led us down a road ofsaying, okay, let's take a step
(38:10):
back.
We're trying to be all thingsto all audiences, to find our
market fit and see what ouropportunity is here.
We think we know what it lookslike, but we're learning nuanced
aspects of it.
So let's take a step back.
And what we decided to do andthis is our head of marketing,
also from Spain, roger Soleil.
(38:31):
He came up with this thing thathe called the one brand
strategy that we put in play,which is the one brand strategy
which is okay, we're just goingto market as VIX now.
That's all we're going to talkabout.
We're not going to do the VIXand VIX plus.
We're going to be verystraightforward.
We're going to acquire peopleinto the AVOD tier.
There'll be some campaigns onthe SVOD tier, but the
(38:51):
difference is we're thinkingabout it as a tier rather than a
different thing.
So with this mindset you go andyou use, you create this funnel
, you bring people into the Avodservice.
Some percentage of them you'regoing to convert into SVOD
subscriber, right, and thathelps your cost of customer
acquisition because you'remining among your own audience
(39:14):
and if they do churn, they'reonly going back to the Avod
service, right, so you're notlosing them forever.
So that's kind of some of themaybe some of the madness, the
rhyme to the reason here, and Ithink you know that has served
us well.
So at this point in time, wehave VIX and we have VIX premium
inside.
But see, here's the thinginside.
(39:35):
But see, here's the thing Nowthat we're getting smarter about
our personas and we're startingto know and recognize the
patterns and the propensities ofthe people that are not likely
to subscribe, what we can do iswe can ratchet down all the
lifecycle comms that we headtheir way with right we could
(39:55):
give them.
We could do more to drive themback into the service from a
frequency standpoint, right,rather than trying to upgrade
them all the time, because I'msure their experience is coming
into the service, we're going touse a tool like Braze to do an
in-app alert and block them,right.
They're trying to watchsomething we got, this thing
they got to cancel out of.
(40:15):
We're trying to pitch them onthis upgrade to this VIX premium
.
Let's stop doing that, right.
Let's not do that to them.
Let's make them happier.
Let's increase the LTV for themas AVOD viewers and be happy
with that, and let them be happywith that and focus on other
(40:35):
personas with the heavylifecycle upgrade mechanism.
See what I mean.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Totally.
It sounds like the Spotify orYouTube pricing model, where
they still offer a forever freetier, where they monetize
through ads, while offering somepremium tiers for people that
do not want to have ads right.
Which?
is different than maybe howNetflix or Disney Plus or the
streaming service are monetizingtoday, and I want to ask you
(41:01):
about the competitive landscape,because it seems like you are
competing for attention, andsome of that attention can be
spent on media and entertainmentstreaming services, but it can
also be spent on social media,music platforms.
How are you thinking about thecompetitive landscape and how
you're trying to get a biggershare of that?
Speaker 2 (41:20):
It's really YouTube more than anything for us is
what we see, as our you know,and even back when I was at
Facebook, I was thinking in timespent terms, right, and so I've
been doing that for a while andthinking about what does it
mean and what does it look liketo drive time spent and what
kinds of things do you do toenrich in that, to make it worth
(41:43):
somebody spending more time?
And I apply some of theframeworks that I used way back
when when I was putting the newsin the newsfeed at Facebook and
that's a for better or worsething, because there was draft
on impact from that.
But I try to think about whatare the things that are going to
bring people uniquely here, andwhat happens is we all know in
(42:09):
YouTube it's the wide world ofeverything.
Everything is there.
But what you don't have there isa 27 minute novella per se.
In some cases you do, but notnot, not commonly, and some.
Well, what we'll do is we'llleverage those channels to drop
shorter clips and highlights anddrive people into the platform.
Before, before VIX was here, wehad a bunch of websites and
(42:33):
apps.
Basically every TV company hasdigital right.
They have apps and websites.
We have those too.
And so there's, there's, thereare whole teams that build these
websites and apps and nurturethem and bring people in with
for page views and sampling.
So it's it's it's the old, it'sthe old adage of like get people
into the sampling processeasily and let them, let them
(42:55):
find their way into the longerform edition of that.
So VIX is really today thelonger form edition of that.
Time will tell if we can cracksome code on maybe some shorter
form like content.
It's tricky, because what youdon't want to do is duplicate
what you're doing on a YouTuberight, because otherwise what's
(43:17):
the point?
You want to be where people areand you want people to come
somewhere else if it makes sense.
So in this case, we've beenlaser focused on longer form
content.
I think our thoughts aroundshorter form is we're trying to
(43:38):
balance the discipline of doingbringing people here for the
reason we know they want to comehere with creating new habits
and new engagement models, rightLike if, if I, if I knew, if I
knew that VIX had something Ican consume at a glance while
(43:58):
I'm waiting in line at thegrocery store, I might go there
and I might spend that, so wemight be able to buy some time
spent in that way, in thatdimension of short-form
consumption, if we can deliveron the unique value, the unique
content that we have.
So we're thinking a lot aboutthat, but by and large, we're
(44:21):
thinking it's more about YouTubeas our competitor, more than
any other streamer per se.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, and as you talk more about expansion, I think
about companies like the NewYork Times and how they were
able to expand now into cookingrecipes or video games.
Netflix is also toying withvideo games or even fitness
programming.
So I think different platformsare mastering one format and
trying to get into other formats.
(44:47):
So curious to know how you goabout preventing your core and
keeping that identity that makesyou unique, while also testing
the ground, knowing that yourstakes are very high, right,
like when you run an experiment.
It's not about getting a fewmore users.
We're talking about the nexthundred million users.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
That's right, and I think we're still in that kind
of table stakes mode.
So, while it's very tempting tothink about things like
in-stream shopping, betting,watch parties, you know, all of
those kinds of things, you knowbecause we do this reality show,
(45:24):
sort of a Big Brother-likething called La Casa de los
Famosos, and it runs for likeseveral weeks at a time, 24-7.
You put a bunch of you knowcelebrities into a house and
what happens?
And people come in at all hoursof the day and night to watch
this thing and you can't helpbut wonder would some people
(45:45):
want to watch that together?
Right?
And is there someco-consumption?
Is there some Twitch-like modelthere?
Right, that might make sense,makes sense.
And so we have to balance.
You know, do we spend thisquarter leading up to the next
La Casa de los Famosos onhardening the platform so that
we can handle the volume and thequality of experience is good,
(46:10):
or do we start dabbling into theTwitch-like watch party?
You know segments, it'stempting, but I try to
prioritize.
Every quarter we sort ofreprioritize and reorder what
we're prioritizing, but whattends to happen is performance.
Platform performance alwaysremains number one, because you
(46:30):
don't have anything else.
Without that, right, peopledon't have any patience.
So we've been performing throughthings like La Casa, through
things like we did the World Cup, and at the time we had just
launched.
Six months later we had donethe World Cup, we had like 3
million concurrent viewers, andso what's different here is I'm
(46:54):
in charge of product but I'malso in charge of engineering,
which is kind of a pattern yousee at media companies.
They used to have them asseparate roles and I think with
just the changes and the waythings are, they sort of started
.
They combine them when they can, and so in my case, when I took
the job, I took both of thoseresponsibilities, as well as
design and operations, so it'sall one.
(47:14):
The beauty of that is I canharmonize those functions and
they're less of a matrix becauseeverybody's kind of one family
and they all take care of eachother, so we can rally behind
things like that, andperformance and scale is kind of
one of those paramount thingsthat we can never take our eye
off of and take for granted.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
That's such a good reminder that sometimes the next
big thing is doing what you do,but better.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Yeah, absolutely A hundred percent, and the
dividends that you can see bydoing that.
And we just are in the processof updating all of our video
players because, especially onmobile, we're about to launch
mobile downloads for the firsttime in the next month and we
(48:03):
needed some, some enhancementsto our player.
Um, in the quality improvementswe're able to make with our
player, guess what?
We're starting to see the totalstreaming hours go up and to
the right right and it's likewhat's different.
Oh, we put a new player inthat's more performant.
It's very basic, but it turnsout when it works people use it
(48:26):
Totally.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
Less flashy maybe than launching a new category or
app, but ultimately it'sdriving the success that you're
looking for.
And just to wrap up thisconversation, michael, I want to
repeat one of your hot takeshere.
You said product managers aretoo utopian.
Can you elaborate more on thatplease?
Speaker 2 (48:44):
Okay, well, to be clear, I don't think every
product manager is too utopian,but it's a tendency.
It's a tendency of a lot ofproduct managers and I've seen
it over and over again and itkind of goes like this you know,
in the pure form of productmanagement, in the discipline,
in the craft of it, right, weall have these first principles,
right, we all have these rulesthat we've accumulated, from
(49:09):
whether it's over time in theyears, on things you've built.
Or, if you're newer into thecraft, maybe you've seen, you've
gone to one of your classes,your courses right, all of these
things are happening.
And maybe you're newer into thecraft, maybe you've seen,
you've gone to one of yourclasses, your courses, right,
all of these things arehappening.
And maybe you're newer to it.
But you start to acquire thisknowledge base of what it means
to do this the right way and inits purest form, you say, okay,
(49:33):
what's the outcome we're lookingfor?
Okay, what are the three thingswe might do to get to that
outcome?
Okay, now it's time to write aproduct brief.
What am I going to build overwhat period of time?
It's aligned with that strategyand drives that outcome.
Well, given, I've done productin different companies now in
tech companies, in my ownstartups that I've started, in
(49:56):
big media companies, in bigbanks.
I've seen it all thesedifferent ways right, and what
happens is if you're doingproduct in a pure tech company,
you got a better shot of livingthat utopian dream right.
You're going to get more ofthat there than anywhere else,
because guess what those pureplay tech companies else.
(50:19):
Because guess what those pureplay tech companies they're not
thinking of draft on impactsacross ecosystems and audiences
so much because they'retechnology companies.
And you saw that with socialmedia.
You're seeing it again with GenAI.
By the way, it's anotherinflection of that challenge.
If you go to a media company,you don't have the luxury of
thinking about it all that way,because what happens is there's
(50:41):
a lot of stakeholders, there's alot of people you got to get
buy-in from.
You got to bring people along,you got to go along with them.
You got to find some places inthe middle.
You got budgets that are goingto be tighter than they are in
tech companies.
Oftentimes, especially now,there's different constraints.
So earlier I talked about theband and the constraints about
being in 1988.
(51:02):
It's very similar to that.
It's like, okay, you only haveso much to spend.
Whereas in Disney+, I thinkwhen I was there probably had
thousands of engineers, I have250 engineers.
Can't think about the world thesame way I did then, right,
it's a very different set ofconstraints.
So you're not going to havepersonalization overnight, for
(51:27):
example.
So if I would have opened up andsaid I wanted to launch it
personalized and nail that coldstart problem at the jump, no
way was that going to bepossible.
I would have been too utopian.
I wouldn't have had time tolaunch all the different
distribution partnerships thatwe had to launch or launch on
all the different tvs that wehad to launch, right, I wouldn't
have had time to do all thosethings.
So I think I've learned thehard way that wherever I go, I
(51:50):
can bring the stuff, the, thegrit, the product.
But I got to apply itdifferently depending on what
the company is, who's there,what their background and
experience is.
You know, a lot of times I knowmy boss here a lot of times.
He came from Viacom so he wasused to.
(52:10):
You know, product and techbeing like this, this service
center, where he was the client.
That's a very different dynamicthan what you're going to be as
a product manager at Meta.
If you're the product manager atMeta and you're launching a
feature and you need thedistribution team to launch some
(52:31):
partnerships, you enlist them.
They're working for you on thisthing.
Or if you need some productmarketing, they're coming to
work for you.
So the tables kind of turn andyou have to be willing to play
it with those dynamics.
Which is why I say a lot oftimes, people that worked with
me in tech companies, they bothwouldn't have the patience, the
(52:51):
nerve or the interest to do itat a media company.
The nerve or the interest to doit at a media company, right,
it's a different set of thingsand I see it's funny I tell
different product managers thatwork for me now I'm like, look,
the good news is, yes, you gotthose constraints, but the
trade-off is you get to work inthis with some of the best
(53:13):
content that so many people inthe world want to see every day.
Right, you don't get that everyday in a tech company.
Speaker 1 (53:21):
Michael, thank you so much for your time.
It's been wonderful to do areal deep dive into how you're
building product for a mediacompany.
Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2 (53:31):
Carlos, it's great to see you.
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