Sling TV — 10-foot Samsung TV experience. Live TV, Shows, Movies, My Library — a unified content navigation system designed for remote-first interaction on any TV surface.
Embedded in Acumen Digital — Sling's internal innovation lab — with an unrestricted mandate to reimagine the live streaming experience across every device and surface. Led a cross-vendor team of designers, shipped across TV consoles, mobile, and web, and designed the Channel Navigator: a tool that let customers build their own channel lineup from scratch.
Sling TV launched in 2015 as the first live TV streaming service in the US — a genuinely new product category with no established design conventions. The CPO needed a designer who could operate at the frontier: not iterating on an existing product, but imagining what live streaming could become across every screen in a customer's life.
I was brought in directly from STARZ — headhunted for the specific combination of streaming experience and innovation thinking — and embedded in Acumen Digital, an innovation lab that operated with deliberate separation from the main Sling product team. No legacy constraints. No "that's how we've always done it." Pure exploration, working directly with the CPO, producing the concepts that would define Sling's next phase.
The cross-vendor team structure meant coordinating designers across different organizational contexts — a skill that translates directly to the multi-team, multi-stakeholder leadership work that defines VP-level design roles. Not just designing, but directing design across organizational boundaries.
The mandate covered the entire Sling product surface — nothing was out of scope. Some of the work shipped directly into the product. Some became R&D that shaped the roadmap. All of it was grounded in the same question: what does live TV streaming look like when it's designed for the person watching, not for the cable company that used to own the relationship?
The cable bundle was the thing cord-cutters hated most. You paid for 200 channels to watch 12. Sling's base packages were already a step forward — but the Channel Navigator was the next leap: a tool that let customers cherry-pick exactly the channels they wanted, building a fully custom lineup from the ground up.
The design challenge was making that choice feel empowering rather than overwhelming. When you can pick anything, the decision architecture matters enormously — how channels are grouped, how add-ons are previewed, how the running cost is surfaced in real time as a customer builds their plan. The Channel Navigator was designed around progressive disclosure: start with the essentials, layer in what you actually want, see your cost update live.
This was the feature that made Sling genuinely different from the competition — and it was an innovation lab project before it was a shipped product. The design thinking behind it became part of how Sling thought about customer-controlled packaging for years.
The 10-foot TV experience was the most technically constrained design surface — different remotes, different hardware limitations, different resolution targets across Samsung smart TVs, Roku, Xbox, and Fire TV. The challenge wasn't just visual design; it was interaction architecture. Remote-control navigation requires a fundamentally different focus-state model than touch or mouse — every state transition had to work with a d-pad, every action had to be reachable with the minimum number of button presses.
The modular design framework we developed allowed the same core interaction patterns to adapt across device constraints, while maintaining a visually consistent experience that felt like one product regardless of which remote was in the viewer's hand.
The mobile app was a different problem from TV entirely. Touch-first navigation, portrait and landscape modes, small screen real estate competing with content-rich experiences. The core design challenge was making live TV feel as natural on a phone as it did on a big screen — without sacrificing content density or forcing users into simplified, watered-down version of the full experience.
The sports hub was a particular focus. Live sports on mobile is a different viewing mode than scripted content — fans want scores, game context, and quick access to switch between live games. The live game detail view surfaced real-time scores, team context, and a video player in a single integrated layout without requiring the user to navigate away from their game to find information about it.
Sling TV debuted at CES 2015 as the first live TV streaming service in the United States, announced by DISH Network to considerable industry attention. The design work happening in the Acumen Digital lab was directly connected to a product that was redefining what television could be — not iterating on an established category, but pioneering one.
The Acumen Digital engagement was explicitly dual-track: some work shipped directly into the Sling product, some remained as R&D that informed the product roadmap. The Channel Navigator, the mobile redesign, the TV console UI 3.0 — these were live design systems that reached millions of Sling subscribers. The exploratory work that didn't ship became part of how Sling thought about customer-controlled packaging and the future of cord-cutting.