Parcel: Media Management & Distribution

Research / Strategy / Direction / Team-building
Background

Prior to its merger with Vox Media, Group Nine was a leading digital media company, home to 5 iconic brands producing hundreds of videos every month, garnering billions of views.

As we evolved from a traditional publisher into a distributed media model, our business strategy hinged on maximizing the value of every piece of content we produced.  This led to the business identifying an extremely lucrative new revenue stream that involved licensing & repackaging content into thematic bundles and distributing them to different streaming platforms.

This shift toward a distributed model required significant investment into our operational capabilities:

  • Seamless collaboration between Audience Development, Analytics, Sales, Legal, and the Brands

  • The ability to search, track, and bundle content as autonomously as possible for licensing deals with very strict requirements.

  • Fast, accurate-decision making hinged on access to clean and consistent metadata and performance insights

The Challenge

Our entire process for managing this new workstream was cumbersome, prone to human error, expensive to operate, and was leaving money on the table.

  • No centralized library: teams manually searched across social platforms, watched videos manually, and logged metadata in disconnected tools

  • Inefficient workflows: Building a package for distribution would often take hours of manual search and vetting

  • Missed Revenue: slow turnaround, rejected feeds, and legal barriers jeopardized critical licensing deals

  • Fractured communication: A lack of visibility and alignment eroded trust between teams

At a critical moment for our business, we needed a scalable centralized solution.

My Role & Leadership

  • Shaped the vision: Pitched and led the creation of a centralized, proprietary video asset management system instead of piecemeal third-party tools that would mean more hoops for users to jump through.

  • Drove user-centered strategy: Conducted in-depth stakeholder interviews and user research across Audience Development, Sales, Legal, Analytics, and Brands to uncover common goals, points of friction, and mission-critical needs.

  • Partnered with Product & Engineering to establish a Roadmap: Identified overlapping pain points across teams, prioritized shared feature requests, and pinpointed team-specific requirements, turning a fragmented wish list into a cohesive, actionable product vision.

  • Built the team: Advocated for and hired a Senior Designer to expand our capacity and execute on the roadmap.

  • Drove strategy & execution: Scoped the MVP, aligned stakeholders, and ensured we iterated based on continuous user feedback.  evolving the product into a scalable solution that supported Group Nine’s distributed content strategy.

Phase 1 - Proving the MVP

  • We built a proof-of-concept MVP to test whether a centralized video asset management system could work. It pulled in data from multiple platforms, brands, and sources into a single interface.

  • Demonstrated that we could connect legal, sales, audience development, and analytics data into a single tool. This proved we didn’t need to rely on disconnected third-party solutions that would only solve part of the problem.

  • The MVP wasn’t pretty, but it validated the core concept and unlocked buy-in for deeper investment.

 
Phase 2 - Evolution of the MVP

  • Recruited a Senior Designer to accelerate the project and ensure we could deliver a polished, user-centric experience.

  • Conducted in-depth UX research sessions—observed users navigating the tool, identified pain points, and gathered requirements across teams.

  • Identified critical V1 priorities that would increase the density of results, eliminate disruptive navigation patterns, introduce advanced filtering and search.

  • Introduced a scalable design system that became the foundation for Parcel and other internal tools at Group Nine—accelerating development and ensuring visual consistency.

Content Density

— The first iteration of Parcel had an extremely low content density that led to a lack of trust in accuracy and thoroughness of search results. A uniform request across all user-groups was the ability to see as much content as possible that meets a specific criteria (ie: show me all 1:1 videos under 45 seconds about pets).

We introduced a significantly denser experience that presented 4-5x the amount of results per-page. Additionally we introduced a table-view that prioritized displaying data (with viewing preference settings per-user) over a more visual experience.

Advanced Filtering

— Parcel was primarily used to generate a distribution feed of content that met a hyper-specific criteria. These feeds were shared with partners as a means of earning traffic and revenue per asset. Accuracy was of utmost importance as the feeds would be automatically rejected if they did not meet the aforementioned criteria.

Resolve Disruptive Navigation Patterns

— Our users strongly disliked being “taken out of the results” when engaging with the content. The back and forth navigation was tedious and resulted in cognitive overload. We solved this by introducing a drawer-style preview of content atop the results that would display high-level insights into a piece of content, with the ability to drill in further if desired.

Super Powered Search

— Armed with advanced content tagging from Microsoft Content Intelligence, as well as our own proprietary metadata, we redesigned the search UI to deliver extremely accurate results.

Key Outcomes

Reduced clicks and overall friction from MVP to V1 by 63%: Searching, filtering, and reviewing content dropped from ~40 clicks to ~15 for our baseline testing of building a 10-video list.

Improved overall workflow’s time-to-complete by over 78%: Prior to Parcel, users would spend north of 45 minutes across at minimum 3 different platforms, searching, aggregating, and validating content.  This same action took only 7-10 minutes in Parcel.

 Rebuilt trust between our core stakeholders and the EPD organization, paving the way for future iterations of Parcel as it was widely adopted across the company.

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