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Media · Enterprise

FOX Corporation

Two years across FOX Sports, FOX Entertainment, and Fox News: a design system all three brands adopted, an ad platform Fortune 500 advertisers ran themselves, internal systems for FOX Weather, and broadcast tools where a mistake goes out live. FOX promoted me to Senior Product Designer inside 18 months.

Role
Senior Product Designer
Timeline
2022 — 2024
Tools
Figma, Design Systems, Research
Team
Cross-divisional Product Design

Context

Range Was the Job

Nearly everything here shipped behind an NDA, so this study stays at the level of detail FOX approved and skips the screens.

My work spanned FOX Sports, FOX Entertainment, and Fox News, plus internal tooling for departments across the company and for FOX Weather. In the same stretch I was setting design-system strategy measured in quarters and shipping production tools that ran during live broadcasts. Holding both ends at once is what the role tested.

Starting Point

Built in Triplicate

FOX Sports, FOX Entertainment, and Fox News each ran on their own component libraries and development workflows. Products across divisions looked and behaved differently. Internal users paid for that in confusion; engineering paid for it in duplicated work, because every team was reinventing solutions on its own.

At the same time, the advertising business needed enterprise-grade tools for clients like Amazon on tight timelines, and the live broadcast teams needed interfaces that hold up under real-time, on-air pressure.

The Design System

Selling Three Brands on Sharing

I started with an inventory instead of a proposal. Auditing product surfaces across the three divisions turned up component after component doing the same job while built three separate times: three date pickers, three data tables, and the same bugs getting fixed on three different schedules. That audit became the argument, because nobody in any division was attached to duplicated bug-fixing.

The obvious move, one universal UI kit, would have died in its first meeting. Sports, Entertainment, and News are distinct brands with distinct audiences, and each division held an effective veto. So the system drew a hard line: primitives like tokens, spacing, accessibility standards, and interaction behavior are shared, while color, type personality, and density stay brand-owned. Each division gave up only the things its users never see.

Adoption worked the same way. One pilot team first, no mandate. When that team’s design-to-build handoff got visibly faster, the next division asked in on its own. The tradeoff was real: full coverage took quarters longer than a top-down decree would have promised. The difference is it actually happened.

Primitives shared, expression brand-owned. That split is what made agreement possible.

The Ad Platform

Enterprise Data, Non-Technical Operators

In parallel, the advertising business needed a segmentation tool that Fortune 500 ad teams could run without an engineer in the room. Most of the design work was subtraction. Raw audience data carries hundreds of dimensions; the interface leads with the dozen or so that ad operators actually reason with and folds the rest behind progressive disclosure. Power users lost nothing. Everyone else stopped needing a translator.

From raw signals to a shipped segment: the funnel ad teams ran themselves.

FOX Weather

Internal Only

I also designed internal systems for FOX Weather. None of that work was public-facing, and it sits further behind the NDA than anything else in this study, so naming it is about as far as I can go.

Live Broadcast

No Second Take

Live production tools can’t be understood from a lab, so I spent time in the control room during live events. The first thing you notice is that operators barely look at the software. Their eyes are on the feeds, the talent, the clock; the interface gets glances. Anything that’s ambiguous in a glance is a defect.

The second thing you notice is the tension around destructive actions. They need protection, but a confirmation dialog that costs two seconds is its own kind of on-air failure. The answer came from the room itself: physical broadcast consoles already use an arm-then-fire pattern, one deliberate action to stage and a second to commit. Bringing that into the software gave operators protection in a shape their hands already trusted.

A different design bar. Live broadcast doesn’t forgive what typical product UX does.

Impact

From Designer to Senior Designer in 18 Months

Most of the hard numbers sit behind NDA, so the clearest proof I can offer is what the work led to. The design system became the standard for cross-divisional development at FOX. All three brands adopted it, and teams that had never shared components stopped rebuilding each other’s work.

The segmentation platform went into daily use by Fortune 500 advertisers, including Amazon. The broadcast tools run in live production during some of the most-watched events on television, where they have to hold up with no second take.

I was promoted from UX/UI Designer and Researcher to Senior Product Designer in 18 months, specifically for carrying unrelated product areas at once and delivering in all of them. That breadth is the thing I’d point to. Very few designers get to set system strategy and ship zero-margin live tools inside the same role.

Reflection

What I Took From It

The slowest work at FOX was people work: getting three divisions, each with its own brand, audience, and tech stack, to accept shared constraints without feeling they’d lost something. A design system at that scale is a negotiation before it is a library, and most of that job was listening.

The broadcast work changed how I design permanently. Whatever a control-room interface gets wrong happens on the air, in front of an audience, so “good enough in the prototype” stops meaning anything. I build for the failure states first now, and treat polish as the thing you earn after the edges are handled.

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