Defining the PS App’s Direction and Design Ownership
The PS App’s mobile direction connected five program priorities to clear design principles and ownership. I developed the shared framework with the design team, giving designers a common view of what we were working toward and how to move each feature forward.
Sony Interactive Entertainment / PlayStation
UX Manager and Mobile Experiences program lead
FY26 planning,
April–June 2026
PS App, with connections to console experiences
Design lead, feature designers, product, and engineering
A mobile program spanning several kinds of work
The PS App connected players to experiences that extended beyond their phones. The program included social features, recent play, notifications, account access, and connections to console. Mobile also released monthly, while console development followed longer cycles. That made the app an important place to test ideas before making broader product commitments.
As program lead and people manager, I needed to make that collection of work understandable. A list of features could describe the schedule, but it would not explain the experience we were building or help designers resolve competing priorities. The team needed a direction that connected individual projects to the role of mobile in the PlayStation ecosystem.
I worked alongside a design lead who focused on craft. My contribution was to frame the program’s direction and establish the responsibilities that supported delivery. The design lead and feature designers continued to lead the design work itself.
Organizing the program around five priorities
I authored and presented the FY26 mobile North Star narrative around five priorities: a connected PlayStation experience, an adaptive home, learning through betas, more relevant notifications, and player retention and engagement.
Together, these priorities described both the experience we wanted to create and how we intended to learn. Connected experiences gave the app a purpose beyond a set of mobile-only features. The beta priority made room to test ideas before treating them as settled product direction. Notification relevance focused attention on the usefulness of an interruption, rather than simply creating more opportunities to send one.
Retention and engagement were program goals. I used them to explain why the work mattered, while keeping the design discussion grounded in the player experience. They were not results the strategy presentation itself could establish.
Making design principles usable in reviews
I paired the priorities with five UX principles: clarity, speed, simplicity, focus, and personalization. These gave the team a common vocabulary for discussing the work alongside its feature requirements.
The distinction mattered. A feature could fit the roadmap and still ask too much of a player, obscure an important action, or add unnecessary choices. The principles helped articulate the kind of experience we intended to make, rather than leaving quality to individual preference.
I presented the direction at the program kickoff so product, engineering, and design could see the same framing. Peers responded positively to the clarity of the presentation, and an engineering lead used my presentation approach as a reference for his own material. That feedback supported the communication work; it did not demonstrate a change in player behavior.
Clarifying how the design team would deliver
The program also needed clear ownership. I authored a roles-and-responsibilities framework covering the program lead, feature lead, supporting designers, and people who needed to be consulted or informed.
The framework made distinctions that a team roster could not. Being involved in a feature did not necessarily mean leading it, and supporting a designer did not mean taking over their decisions. Giving those relationships a shared structure helped explain where responsibility sat and who should participate as the work progressed.
I presented the framework on a common canvas. Designers adopted it as a reference for ownership and explicitly welcomed the additional detail. Their feedback was practical: having responsibilities written down was more useful than relying on assumptions about who would handle each part of a feature.
I also helped introduce mobile office hours as a recurring place to bring mobile and cross-device work to the appropriate designers. The forum complemented the written framework with a way to consult the mobile team while work was developing.
What the work established
The program had a published direction, a concise set of UX principles, and an ownership framework the design team used as a reference. Together, these artifacts connected strategic intent to the people carrying out the work.
Feature experiments and product outcomes were still in progress when I left PlayStation in June 2026. My contribution at that point was the direction and operating clarity: explaining what mobile was working toward, how design would evaluate the experience, and how responsibility was distributed across the team.