Growing PlayStation’s Family Experience and Design Leadership
PlayStation’s family work brought parental controls, family management, and safety together for parents of young players. UX research helped the team understand this audience and establish family as a new measurement vertical, while a thoughtful design-lead handoff supported continuity and clear ownership.
PlayStation · UX Manager · Family and youth product area · iOS and Android
A new audience and measurement vertical
The PlayStation Family app served parents of young players through parental controls, family management, and safety features. This work helped establish family as a new measurement vertical for the PlayStation business, making the needs and experiences of parents and young players more visible as a product opportunity. UX research helped deepen the team’s understanding of this audience and inform how the experience should support them.
The product included a proactive safety notification for parents when a child submitted a report or encountered a bad actor. The app ran on iOS and Android, and its component-level accessibility improvements were later adopted back into the PS App.
I managed the transition around the product work
I appointed a designer to lead the PlayStation Family work and coached the existing lead through the change. The incoming lead needed a clear view of the audience, family-management scope, research insights, safety work, and the partners around the product—not just a list of open tasks.
I coached the existing lead to articulate a vision that would give the incoming designer clear parameters. I also emphasized introducing the relevant partners, transferring context, and then stepping back so the new lead could make decisions and own the work.
This was change management inside active product work: preserve continuity, transfer understanding, clarify decision ownership, and create room for the next lead to make the work their own.
Product and team outcomes stayed distinct
The design-lead transition was completed. Separately, component-level accessibility improvements from the family app were adopted back into the PS App. Another designer presented and led those accessibility changes; my contribution in this case was the leadership transition and the coaching that supported it.
The brief says usage figures belong to the product. No confirmed usage result is included here, so the outcome is the completed handoff and the work to establish family as a meaningful audience and measurement vertical—not a claim about app adoption or business impact.
A handoff grounded in audience understanding
I combined a clearer product frame with practical transition support: understand the family audience through UX research, articulate a vision, introduce the people involved, transfer context, and then step back. The incoming designer took the lead while the team continued work on family management, parental controls, and safety for parents and young players.