Our team and production partners on a mid-year shoot at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim
Designing for a culture of creativity, trust, and shared purpose
📍 The Walt Disney Co.The Digital Content team is a story and interactive media production group spread across California and Florida. Its focus is on narrative-driven content, and highlighting our various parks, hotels, and cruise ships around the world.
Creative Leadership
From April 2022 to Dec 2023, I managed and creative directed this team, leading a production crew of story editors, illustrators, product designers, and motion designers (I’ve since transitioned to leading the Disney PhotoPass design group). As a former designer and editor, I consistently focused my leadership on lifting those aspects of our team culture that had once pushed my creative spirit and made me feel like a key contributor to a greater cause.
Below is a series of design thinking artifacts, as well as team culture photos and videos that hopefully best represent an approach grounded on building trust, and injecting moments of play to fuel our creative quality and inspire a team toward a shared purpose.
In 2024, I transitioned to a leadership role overseeing PhotoPass creative. My old Digital Content team created this send-off video largely to see me tear up, and to wish me the best in this new endeavor.
The work we did in video production and storytelling can be found in a separate case study on this site. Click to check it out!
Team Culture and Design Philosophy
I based the core of our team culture approach on this single principle: There was a unique flavor to the way we approached our work, one to be championed and protected as we grew and shifted.
In Practice
Empowering team members to run their show, find confidence in their element, and stretch beyond their bounds has been key to earning their trust and respect. I enter any work-in-progress with a supporter disposition, offering notes and creative direction where most impactful, and always backed by sound rationale.
A Feedback Culture
Hunger for feedback is a key philosophy of mine. I ask team members to consider their peers a braintrust. This means entrusting them to care for their baby, and share thoughts with suspended ego and their best interest always top of mind.
Process
A spirit of play at work fuels perceived safety, which emboldens teammates to bring their best judgment and highest quality of creative.
Outstanding Team Values
Across our weekly meetings, I always remain intentional to find ways to promote those team values that bind us and reinforce our mission toward elevated quality and excellent partnership.
Creative Quality
My ask for the team is always “are we making our best work yet, today?” Founded on a bedrock of design principles, I push for intentionality in color theory, composition, storytelling, and simplicity.
Togetherness
How do we engineer and champion moments of connection amongst each other. Much of it comes down to building a sense of identity, a team brand and North Star we can rally around.
Gratitude
Trust and belonging sprout from a feeling of gratitude. Gratitude must remain a core value of the team, and space must be built for it to invite a feeling of safety. This feeling emboldens creatives to share honest feedback, and seek feedback in turn, putting in motion the wheels of collective design growth.
Impact
The Magic of Tone Leadership
When internal partners have sought to spend their budget on creating content with our team, they’ve remarked largely on the quality of the culture and partnership we’ve provided. It’s been a consistently outstanding aspect of our style that has set the tone and invited others to follow.
Partner Recognition Below
The slides below represent just a few of the many emails, slack messages, and texts received over the years from partners recognizing our work. I would always bring this into our weekly meetings in the form of a slide meant to share my gratitude collectively and with individual teammates.
