Disney+
Disney+ is a global streaming platform from The Walt Disney Company, launched in 2019 and expanded to 60+ countries across CJK, LATAM, Australia, and Europe within two years.
Overview
Joined pre-launch as the lead designer for international, owning foundational research, product design, design systems, and growth strategy across mobile, web, and TV.
Led regional research to surface cultural and navigational nuances that translation alone could not solve. Drove the typography and font strategy across CJK, Latin, and RTL scripts, navigating orthography rules, accessibility requirements, and rendering constraints at launch scale. Built and validated the product across languages, devices, and markets ahead of each regional rollout.
Tools
For Product Design, Design System, and Typography Research
For Research, Workshops, and Collaborative Mapping
Disney+ launched in 2019 with one mandate:
go global in under two years.
I joined pre-launch as the lead designer for international, owning the strategy to scale a US product across dozens of markets simultaneously.
The project
Disney+ had a hard deadline to reach 30+ countries in two years, with an American product built for a single language, culture, and content expectation.
The challenge wasn't localization, it was building an internationalization framework flexible enough to serve Tokyo, São Paulo, Sydney, and Paris without fragmenting into dozens of disconnected experiences.
Every US product decision had downstream consequences for every market that followed, at the speed of a startup, at the quality bar of one of the world's most recognized brands.
Iterating
Research
Led regional research across key launch markets to surface cultural and navigational nuances that translation alone could not solve.
Listen
Become
Process
Feature Enhancement
Pillars of International
Impact
The internationalization framework built pre-launch became the foundation for one of the fastest global expansions in streaming history. Disney+ today operates in 150 countries with over 132 million subscribers — infrastructure that was designed to scale from day one.