Sling TV — 10-foot Advanced 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 at CES 2015 as America's first live TV streaming service. Nobody had designed this product category before because it didn't exist. The CPO needed someone who'd already been working at the frontier — not someone who'd figure it out from first principles.
I got the call from STARZ. They embedded me in Acumen Digital, an innovation lab intentionally walled off from the main product team. No roadmap constraints. No "here's the existing pattern." Direct CPO access. I was there to think about what Sling could become, not what it currently was.
The team was cross-vendor — designers from different orgs, different reporting lines, different ways of working. I figured out how to direct across those boundaries as I went. It turned out that was the job, not just a condition of the job.
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 thing cord-cutters hated most about cable was the bundle. Pay for 200 channels, watch 12. Sling's base packages were already better — but the Channel Navigator was the concept I was actually excited about: let customers build their own lineup, channel by channel, from scratch.
The problem with total freedom is paralysis. When you can pick anything, the decision architecture is the design. I worked out how to group channels so the choice felt structured, how to surface the running cost in real time so nothing felt hidden, how to layer add-ons without making the base feel like a skeleton. Progressive disclosure — start simple, add what you actually want.
It started as an innovation lab concept. The thinking behind it shaped how Sling approached customer-controlled packaging for years after I left.
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 system 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.
Some of it shipped. The TV console UI 3.0, the mobile redesign, the Channel Navigator — live design that reached actual Sling subscribers. Some of it was R&D that shaped the roadmap without becoming a product. That's what innovation lab work is: you're not always building for now. Sometimes you're showing the org what's possible so they can get there eventually.