Feed Program Management

With the continued rollout of Crunchyroll 2.0 on all the various platforms, managing home feeds for Crunchyroll, both within the United States and internationally, needed a solution before the new homepage went live.

FMS Portal, or Feed Management Service Portal, is an internal tool used by Product, Audience Development, and Marketing, to help deliver various home feeds globally, to all of our platforms. With the idea that this will lead to and increase in minutes watched and overall video engagement within Crunchyroll.

I was asked to help design and support all things related to FMS Portal, for the soon to be released Crunchyroll 2.0 homepage.

Like with most internal tools, time and resources were my two limiting factors. The release date for the Crunchyroll 2.0 homepage was Q1 2021, and I began work on FMS Portal in July of 2020. Initial design work needed to be provided to engineers mid September, so I was once again low on time, and had only a handful of engineers actually making FMS Portal. In fact, we used the same engineers from Config Delta!

We started off with an initial kickoff where stakeholders had a quick overview of the project, and gave a high level view of what they needed for the initial release of FMS Portal. After that, I worked with stakeholders on their predefined wireframes to make sure that I understood the flow of the application correctly. From there, we broke down the project into bite-sized chunks.

By breaking down FMS Portal into variable chunks, I worked in two-week design sprints, and tracked all work via Abstract and InVision, to help create a continuous design feedback loop with stakeholders and myself. By doing this, engineers were able to work on parts of the FMS Portal that were tagged, "design done", and I was able to work on sections of FMS without blocking engineering. The entirety of FMS Portal was "design done" by the end of November 2020, and I'm now preparing for additional features that Product wants for FMS before Crunchyroll 2.0 is released.

Deliverables were provided to engineers via Zeplin, separated by their specific functions, as well as clickable prototypes via InVision. Like with Config Delta, being able to sit down with stakeholders and engineers to iron out the functionality of FMS Portal was critical to the success of not only FMS Portal, but Crunchyroll 2.0. Being able to program feeds for Crunchyroll will allow our teams to cater to specific audiences around the world. It will allow for a more robust and diverse feed for our global audience so that they can watch even more anime!

I was given a preview of FMS Portal being used to create curated collections, feeds, as well as carousel collections. Seeing how the system recognized if there were multiple localizations already filled in for curated collections, and showing up on Crunchyroll staging was really cool to see. With FMS Portal, Audience Development, Product, and Marketing will be able to create robust home feeds for a global audience, and I'm glad that I was a part of the process to see it through.