BornSmart was a kids-focused SVOD product targeting parents who wanted curated, age-appropriate educational content. The brief: build a cross-platform streaming product from scratch across iOS, Android, and web, with a curation-first content philosophy and tight infrastructure budget constraints. The competitive landscape was dominated by global players with vastly larger libraries.
Competing on library size was a losing battle. We had to win on curation, kid-safe UX, and reliability. The product had to launch fast enough to validate market fit, but stable enough that parents would trust it with their children's screen time. Infrastructure spend had to be defended against quality tradeoffs at every step.
I owned the roadmap from 0 to 1 across all three platforms. I prioritized MVP modules based on competitive research in kids streaming and retention data from comparable products, focusing on browse rows, curated categories, video playback, and parental controls. I authored video metadata specs and user stories for the engineering team, ensuring consistent content rendering across iOS, Android, and web.
For retention, I shipped a save-and-resume feature that synced playback state across platforms, sustaining 30-minute average watch sessions at 99.9% uptime. I made cost-vs-quality tradeoff calls with engineering on cloud infrastructure spend, defending streaming quality where parents would notice and accepting tradeoffs where they would not.
To improve discovery, I ran A/B tests on browse rows and curated category surfaces, rolling winning variants into the roadmap based on cohort behavior data, lifting conversion 20% and engagement 25%. I ran UAT with QA and design partners across five product builds and documented business logic in Confluence for scrum, CMS, and backend engineering teams, cutting post-launch defects by 50%.
Measured. Documented. Repeatable.
"For a kids product, trust is the moat. Parents do not return if the experience is buggy or the content drift feels unsafe. Every prioritization call traced back to that: ship less, ship safer, document more. The save-and-resume feature was small in scope but disproportionately drove return visits because it matched how families actually watch.