It’s easy to feel passionate about your favorite streaming service, but passion takes on a whole new meaning when you get the chance to build a streaming service of your own.
That chance is exactly what Emily Mosbacher, partner and brand marketing director at Philo, had in front of her in 2017. In the cable-cutting era of media, the team at Philo banded together to introduce a new streaming service to the market that combined traditional TV and digital channels for households who wanted access to cable with a more convenient price point.
Now in its seventh year, Philo continues to thrive on the same principles that Mosbacher’s team used to build it: positivity and a passion for tinkering.
“We are constantly looking for ways to improve the experience,” said Mosbacher. “Because at the end of the day, we’re also building Philo for ourselves.”
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve. At the end of the day, we’re also building Philo for ourselves.”
Passion is never a bad quality to have for a product launch, but a drive to make the perfect product can lead to delays, scope creep and extended budgets and timelines. For someone in a leadership role, keeping the team on track to meet its goals often requires a strategy that paces the work into digestible milestones. In Mosbacher’s case, this meant building a framework that both outlined the scale of the project in stages and the decision-makers in each stage.
“We always aim, where possible, to break bigger projects up into smaller pieces and phases,” noted Mosbacher.
Looking back on this remarkable achievement — very few people can say they’ve launched a whole streaming service — Built In had the chance to ask Mosbacher about Philo’s process. In the spirit of Philo’s step-by-step approach, she’s breaking down the elements that led the Philons to a successful launch.
Why did the company need to build Philo’s streaming service? What impact will this product launch have on the business or its customers?
Philo’s mission has always been to build a TV service that people love as much as they love their favorite shows. The core tenet of that mission has been to always put the customer first — in product development, design, marketing, advertising and communications, we strive to put ourselves in the shoes of our users and put what is best for their experience at the forefront.
Philo’s streaming service product launch in 2017 aimed to “break the bundle” — in reference to the bloated cable packages that had become so prevalent for users who were only interested in a small subset of that content — while delivering on an excellent, intuitive user experience.
We strive to put ourselves in the shoes of our users and put their experience at the forefront.”
Ultimately, our goal was to deliver an affordable TV package that delivered a premium experience for users who don’t need or want to be paying for expensive cable packages.
What role did you play in developing and launching the product? What tools or technologies did your team use to build the product and why?
At the time of our product launch, I managed our partner and brand marketing. I also launched Philo’s press page and ran our social media handles. Additionally, I worked on Philo’s support team, including taking the first-ever phone call to Philo Support.
Philo’s Tech Stack for Product Launches:
- Slack. For internal communication across the entire product launch, including development, marketing, press, strategy, etc.
- Gitlab. For code management
- JIRA. For project, time and sprint management and planning
- Notion. For company-wide and team-specific documentation and project and pipeline management
- Figma. For collaborative design work.
What obstacles did you encounter along the way? How did you keep team members motivated and aligned throughout the product development process?
Philo employees — or Philons — often discuss the idea that we are a company of “tinkerers.” We all care very deeply about the product, the company, and the projects that we work on. Having that level of engagement from my coworkers at all levels is one of my favorite parts of Philo’s culture — but it can also present challenges. We often need to remind ourselves that, “perfect is the enemy of good” when we find ourselves falling victim to challenges like scope creep.
As a project and team lead, I aim to get ahead of issues like scope creep by clearly outlining the goal of the project or product launch, how we will measure our work against that goal and what the next steps would look like based on the outcome. Typically, we try to identify a strategy that will allow us to “crawl, walk and eventually run” with a given project or launch.
We remind ourselves that ‘perfect is the enemy of good.’”
When this approach falters, and we have projects or product work that have expanded in scale, we rely on the RACI matrix — a common responsibility assignment table for project management — we’ve outlined for that project to solicit the relevant parties’ opinions on how we should move forward.
What teams did you collaborate with to get this across the finish line? What strategies did you employ to ensure that cross-functional collaboration went smoothly?
I have collaborated across, and in most cases worked on, the marketing, design, product, support, business development, content and engineering teams for every launch I have worked on at Philo.
As the company has grown over the years, I have worked with fellow senior Philons to build out a series of cross-functional teams that each focus on a different core area of our business.
From engagement and discoverability to audience growth, these teams are tasked with and trusted to identify the potential areas of improvement that our product and business can take on, in order to inform our company-wide goals.
To realize these goals, we rely on the RACI matrix to identify who within these teams needs to be responsible, accountable, consulted and informed on any project or launch that we have prioritized. This system allows us to identify a tight group of cross-functional collaborators to work expediently while keeping stakeholders in the loop at key inflection points.
When you think of other companies in your industry, how does Philo compare when it comes to how you build and launch new products?
As I referenced earlier, one of Philo’s core tenets is to always put the user first; this holds true for and applies to decisions we make across Philo’s product experience, marketing presence and messaging, advertising experience and customer support.
The evidence of this ethos can be found just about anywhere you look at Philo. We invest in maintaining a 90 percent or higher customer satisfaction rating for our support team. We conduct user studies and experiments in preparation and conjunction with any new feature or product launch to ensure we have the qualitative and quantitative data to support that feature contributing to a good user experience.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about what makes the Philo team so great to work with?
Philo’s culture is steeped in positivity. This tentpole of our company and community takes many forms — from always assuming positive intent from fellow Philons to keeping a slack channel exclusively dedicated to giving fellow Philons kudos, titled “#kudos”. This is just one of many seemingly small quirks of our company that have kept me here for eight years.
