Nathan Payne
Senior Platform Product Manager
San Francisco, CA[email protected]
nathanpayne.comlinkedin.com/in/nathanpaynegithub.com/nathanjohnpayne
Summary
Senior Platform Product Manager, 20+ years in media technology and streaming. Led the SDK and platform layer behind Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN across connected TVs, consoles, and MVPD set-top boxes worldwide. Now focused on AI-augmented product development: building working products with coding agents, designing multi-agent review systems, and developing the governance and measurement practices that make agent-assisted delivery reliable.
Skills
- Product & Platform
- Platform strategy · Partner ecosystems · Device certification · Roadmap ownership · Program leadership · Release governance · Operational readiness
- Analytics & Operations
- Snowflake · Looker · Conviva · Sentry · Datadog · PostHog · Financial modeling · KPI frameworks · Executive reporting · Portfolio dashboards
- AI-Augmented Development
- Claude Code · Codex · Cursor · CodeRabbit · Anthropic / Claude API · OpenAI API · MCP · LLM application development · Multi-agent code review · AI-assisted PR pipelines · Agent governance · Agent failure-mode diagnosis
- Technical
- TypeScript · JavaScript · React · Next.js · Astro · Tailwind · Vite · Zod · Firebase · Bash · Python · GitHub Actions · Playwright · Vitest
- Domains
- Connected-TV streaming · Subscription activation · Media platforms · Sports and entertainment · Partner and vendor management
Experience
Senior Product Manager—Disney Entertainment and ESPN Product & Technology
Product lead for the SDK and platform layer that runs Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN on partner devices. Scope included device certification, partner integrations, platform observability, release engineering, and cross-program alignment with player, engineering, product, and TPM teams.
- Led Disney’s launch on Amazon’s Linux-based Vega OS (Kepler), porting Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN and shipping on schedule with no measurable engagement impact on Disney’s fourth-largest living-room platform (~18M monthly active Fire TV devices).
- Conceived and secured approval for an $18.1M investment in NCPv3, a JavaScript/React runtime that let Disney’s mature JavaScript app run across PlayStation, Xbox, Vega OS, MVPD set-top boxes, and smart TVs—retiring the parallel Rust app and consolidating two codebases and two teams into one. Success depended entirely on app teams choosing to build on the shared runtime.
- Rebuilt partner device intelligence from spreadsheets to structured data, replacing 40+ inconsistent partner questionnaires with a qualification and certification system backed by Snowflake, Partner Portal data, and Looker dashboards. The system now supports AV1/HEVC compliance analysis across Germany and Brazil.
- Led On-Device Activation, a multi-partner subscription-activation program that lets subscribers activate Disney+ through their pay-TV operator account instead of re-authenticating in-app. Rolled out across EMEA, LATAM, and APAC operators including Fetch in Australia and Claro in Brazil.
- Shipped multiple ADK releases adding live playback, ad playback, advanced video/audio format support, text-to-speech, encrypted audio, and observability improvements, including ADK 4.0 GA in March 2026.
- Introduced an AI-powered PR review pipeline for the NCPF App Foundations squad, reducing the median PR cycle time from 7.4 days to 4 days and exceeding the 30% Q2 OKR target. Policy is now AI review plus two human reviewers, moving toward AI plus one.
- Owned platform health reporting across Conviva, Sentry, and Datadog, including weekly executive narration of FPS, error rates, Glimpse attribution, and AI PR cycle time.
Senior Technical Project Manager, Lead—Disney Streaming
Led front-end engineering teams that built and launched Disney+ across connected devices.
- Brought Disney+ from concept to launch across living-room platforms, coordinating with engineering, design, product, QA, and release stakeholders.
- Led PlayStation prototyping that produced the first living-room Disney+ experience to launch.
- Rebuilt the Disney+ app for MVPD set-top boxes, recreating the full product experience on constrained hardware from operators.
- Led Hulu through its PlayStation 5 launch.
Technical Project Manager—MLB Advanced Media / BAMTech Media
Managed OTT app development for Roku, Chromecast, PlayStation, and Xbox across MLBAM platforms and partners, including MLB.com, HBO, Fox Sports, Eurosport, MLS, and NHL. Owned iteration management, development coordination, feature scheduling, QA alignment, certification, and deployment.
Director of Information Technology—AJ+
Ran Broadcast Engineering, Media Operations, and IT for the launch of a 24/7 digital news operation and the AJ+ social video app—including a live OTT stack (Level 3, Adobe Primetime DRM, Brightcove) and $335K in annual vendor savings.
Senior Systems Architect—Current TV
Built ingest, play-out, on-air graphics, and live tweet-moderation systems through Current TV’s pivot from user-generated content to prime-time network news, launching three nightly shows within 30 days of acquisition.
Systems Architect / Support Roles—CNN
Conceptualized and led the CNN Magic Wall—the multi-touch platform used on-air for real-time and historical news data. Also built the $3M Election Express mobile video system, 36-camera virtual studios rendering live 3D “holograms” of remote reporters, and owned $2M project capital budgets.
Education
B.S., Management Information Systems & Decision Sciences
Certifications
- Building and Scaling Subscription Businesses
- Certified Scrum Professional - Product Owner (CSP-PO)
- Principles & Qualities of Genuine Leadership
Projects
Products—and the decisions behind them · nathanpayne.com/projects
Products across consumer, enterprise, finance, and developer tooling. Built with AI agents; case studies focus on the decisions, tradeoffs, and evidence behind them.
Selected projects:
SHIPPED
Five Across—Live Multiplayer Social Bingo Platform
React · TypeScript · Vite · Firebase · Cloud Functions · Cloudflare Workers · PostHog
Live multiplayer bingo for group trips, conceived, built, and operated end-to-end: daily themed cards that unlock on ship time, offline-first marking that queued through dead zones and synced on reconnect, live feature updates shipped mid-voyage, and share moments designed for the group chat. Played on phones throughout a nine-night Mediterranean cruise; now being generalized into a multi-event platform.
SHIPPED
Mergepath—Agent Governance Infrastructure
Bash · Python · GitHub Actions · 1Password · Claude Code · Codex · Cursor · CodeRabbit
Governance framework for AI-assisted software development combining repository standards, automated review workflows, multi-agent validation, and CI-enforced documentation. Deployed across a nine-repository fleet as of August 2026.
SHIPPED
Override—Broadway Financial Operating System
Next.js · TypeScript · Tailwind · Firebase · Recharts · Vitest
Broadway financial modeling product that turns static deal documents into an interactive capitalization, waterfall, scenario, and investor-return model. Built as an AI coding exercise; it has not yet run a real capitalization. Informed by my own experience as an investor in the Broadway revival of Proof.
ARCHIVED
Device Source of Truth—Partner Device Intelligence Platform
React · TypeScript · Vite · Tailwind · Zod · Firebase · Express · Vitest
Device intelligence platform that unified five fragmented partner-data feeds into one registry, with AI-assisted questionnaire extraction and human authority over consequential commits. Public fork uses entirely synthetic data; production data and repository remain private.
PAUSED
Matchline—AI Career CRM
React · TypeScript · Vite · Tailwind · Firebase · Anthropic · OpenAI · Vitest
A career CRM for a serious job search: it turns work history into structured, reusable evidence, maps that evidence to specific job requirements, and generates applications in which every claim is checked against approved evidence before export. Development stopped before launch after extraction accuracy reached 51.3% against an 80% quality bar; the final work repaired a noisy evaluation system rather than improving the product.
EXPERIMENT
Swipe Watch—Content Discovery Prototype
Vanilla JavaScript · Firebase Hosting
Swipe-based content discovery for Disney+ and Hulu. The prototype inadvertently simulated the recommendation payoff it was meant to test, making reactions to the demo impossible to separate from reactions to the concept. Demoed to Disney’s EVP of Product.
SHIPPED
Friends & Family Billing—Shared-Bill Coordination
React · JavaScript · Vite · Firebase · Vitest · Playwright
Shared billing for recurring household costs that shows recipients the arithmetic, tracks settlement, and handles questions without requiring an account. Built for nine people across five households.
Writing
The AI-Augmented PM—nathanpayne.com/blog
Writing on AI-assisted product development, agent governance, multi-agent review patterns, and software delivery.
Selected essays: