SKY

As part of the King’s College London Product Management Career Accelerator, I collaborated with Sky on a project aimed at enhancing closed captioning for Sky Glass. The challenge was to transform accessibility features into an intuitive, inclusive, and user-friendly experience that catered to both users with disabilities and the wider audience who benefit from customisable viewing options.

Our solution, everyONE, introduces a Sky Glass native app that enables users to create personalised viewing themes, seamlessly adjusting captions, audio, and display settings to enhance engagement and accessibility for all users.

Context

Sky’s vision emphasises innovation, inclusivity, and customer-centric design. The project aimed to align with Sky’s accessibility goals while addressing user expectations for greater customisation and ease of use.

Through market research, user validation, and iterative prototyping, we identified that customisable caption settings, intuitive navigation, and AI-driven enhancements were essential to delivering a seamless closed captioning experience. By embedding these features within a native Sky Glass app, everyONE aimed to redefine accessibility as a mainstream feature rather than a niche function.

Objective

Duration: 6 weeks.

Purpose: Improve user experience with subtitles by introducing a user-friendly, highly customisable accessibility solution.

Goal: Provide a seamless, user-centric approach to accessibility, ensuring that customisation settings enhance both usability and inclusivity across Sky’s ecosystem.

Actions

User-Centric Strategy and Research

Market & Competitor Analysis: Mapped industry accessibility standards and identified gaps in Sky Glass’s closed captioning experience.

User Research: Surveyed 114 users and analysed 60+ Sky Glass community threads to identify synchronisation issues, readability challenges, and customisation demands.

Accessibility Personas: Used Sky’s accessibility personas to ensure inclusivity beyond traditional accessibility users.

2. Strategic Product Development and Innovation

Feature Prioritisation: Utilized story mapping to identify high-impact solutions, prioritizing those that offered the greatest business value and user benefits. Initially focused on customization themes, followed by AI-driven enhancements and adaptive accessories.

Roadmap Definition: Structured the MVP with immediate improvements while planning future scalability for advanced accessibility features.

Iterative Prototyping & Validation: Aligned the prototyping and validation process hand-in-hand, ensuring continuous refinements based on real user feedback.

3. Prototyping and Usability Testing

High-Fidelity Prototype: Designed an interactive Figma prototype demonstrating theme-based customisation, integrated into Sky Glass’s ecosystem.
(Interactive Prototype)

Usability Testing: Conducted two rounds of moderated testing, confirming that users found the everyONE app easy to navigate and intuitive.

Validation Outcomes: Users expressed enthusiasm for a centralised accessibility solution, confirming that everyONE improved their viewing experience and ease of use.

4. Go-to-Market Strategy and Business Value

Repositioning Accessibility as Inclusivity: Ensured messaging resonated with all users, overcoming accessibility stigma.

Incremental Feature Rollout Strategy: Recommended a phased launch for early user adoption, feedback collection, and feature optimisation before full-scale deployment.

Proposed Success Metrics: Suggested KPIs such as feature reach and adoption rates, engagement and retention rates, and inclusivity tracking.

Desired Outcomes

> Enhanced Viewing Experience & Accessibility

Seamless Customisation: Provided a more intuitive way for users to adjust subtitles, benefiting both accessibility users and mainstream audiences.
User-Centric Innovation: Integrated AI-driven features to improve real-time caption synchronisation and translation, ensuring better readability and engagement.

> Seamless Product Integration & Business Impact

Effortless Adoption: everyONE was designed as a native Sky Glass app, ensuring easy integration and high feature adoption rates.
Brand & Market Differentiation: Strengthened Sky’s position as an inclusive and user-centric platform, fostering higher engagement and customer satisfaction.

Learning & Future Enhancements

> Unleashing Creativity in a Structured Way

What I Learned: Creativity needs to flow freely in team discussions, but structuring creative output allows for better synergies, connections, and integrations. This project reinforced the importance of capturing and organising ideas effectively to ensure they translate into actionable, high-impact solutions.
What I Would Do Differently: Introduce a systematic approach to capturing creative ideas, such as structured brainstorming sessions with clear documentation and follow-ups, ensuring that innovative concepts are tracked, prioritised, and connected to the overall strategy.

> Balancing Innovation & Simplicity

What I Learned: Designing an inclusive yet intuitive accessibility feature required thoughtful trade-offs between simplicity and functionality. This experience helped me refine my decision-making approach, ensuring that every feature added genuine user value without unnecessary complexity.
What I Would Do Differently: Establish clear prioritisation criteria earlier in the process to balance user needs with feasibility constraints, ensuring that essential features are delivered first while avoiding unnecessary complexity in the MVP.

> Iterative Validation as a Core Process

What I Learned: Testing with real users at multiple stages ensured a data-driven approach to decision-making. This project deepened my understanding of how iterative validation drives product refinement, reinforcing my belief that early and continuous user feedback is crucial to delivering impactful solutions.
What I Would Do Differently: Implement more frequent, smaller-scale validation rounds throughout the development process to capture insights earlier and adjust faster, rather than waiting for major testing phases to identify key improvements.

Skills & Competencies Demonstrated

Customer-Centric Mindset & Business Acumen: Developed a user-first solution that aligns with Sky’s business values while enhancing customer experience.

Strategic Thinking & Agile Project Management: Led an iterative, roadmap-driven approach, ensuring feature prioritisation and seamless execution.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Stakeholder Management: Coordinated cross-functional team members and collaborated with stakeholders to ensure strategic alignment and buy-in.

Adaptability & Continuous Learning: Adjusted strategies in real-time based on user insights and evolving project needs, reinforcing a flexible, growth-oriented mindset.

Problem Solving & Risk Management: Used research-backed frameworks to navigate feature prioritisation and technical feasibility challenges.

Technical Understanding & International Perspective: Designed a scalable, globally relevant solution, ensuring regulatory compliance and cross-market adoption.

The everyONE project was an invaluable opportunity to apply Product Management principles in a real-world simulation with Sky. This experience deepened my expertise in user research, accessibility innovation, product strategy, and iterative development, reinforcing my ability to lead impactful, user-centric solutions in a fast-paced environment.