Walt Disney Animation Studios
Playbook Milestones Redesign
Making production timelines clearer and more usable across roles
Project type
Internal Tool · Systems Design
Timeline
Summer 2025 (12 weeks)
Role
Product Design Intern
Designing clarity into studio-wide production planning
During my internship at Walt Disney Animation Studios, I worked on Playbook, the studio’s internal production management tool used to coordinate schedules, staffing, and planning across active films.
My focus was the Milestones experience, where show teams, finance, and studio leadership track key production dates. The goal of this project was to improve how different roles access, interpret, and align around timeline data.
At a higher level, this work focused on designing systems that support clarity at scale, while remaining trusted and usable across very different roles and responsibilities.
One timeline could not serve many different roles
Milestones was intended to be a shared source of truth, accessible to the entire studio, but in practice, it suffered from missing data, inaccurate data, and limited context. Even when milestones existed, they often lacked information about ownership, assumptions, or how plans had changed over time.
Show teams were responsible for entering and maintaining this data, but the system did not meaningfully support their day-to-day planning. As a result, these teams tracked more accurate and detailed schedules in personal spreadsheets or decks, while Milestones was often updated after the fact, if at all.
This created a broken cycle:
Leadership didn’t trust the data because it was incomplete or outdated
Show teams didn’t invest in maintaining it because it didn’t reflect how they actually worked
While visual clarity and outdated patterns were considerations in the redesign, the core issue was a misalignment between who owned the data and who the system was designed to serve.
Understanding how teams use and visualize production data
The process focused on understanding how teams actually work with production data.
I learned this by:
Interviewing producers, associate producers, production finance, department managers, and studio planning leadership
Learning how teams visualize timelines in spreadsheets, decks, and custom views
Mapping how milestone data is created, compared, and shared across roles
From this, I identified:
What key information teams need for their daily workflows
What details matter only in specific contexts
How teams compare past, present, and future production plans
These insights shaped how Milestones could better reflect real planning behavior, rather than forcing all roles into a single representation.
A role-aware milestones experience built for real production work
I designed a reimagined Milestones experience that supports different planning needs while maintaining a shared source of truth.
The redesigned approach focused on:
Role-aware timeline views that surface different levels of information depending on user context, allowing sensitive details to remain visible only to the roles that need them
Clear hierarchy and labeling, replacing abstract indicators with explicit milestone details
Contextual detail on demand, keeping the main timeline readable while allowing deeper inspection
Sandbox and scenario planning concepts that support early, uncertain planning work before timelines are ready for broader visibility
Consistent navigation and interaction patterns aligned with Playbook, reducing friction and lowering the barrier to adoption
The redesigned Milestones experience addresses the root cause of data quality issues rather than just their symptoms.
By making the system more flexible and valuable for show teams, the redesign encouraged more accurate and timely data entry, while giving leadership greater confidence in the information they relied on for planning and decision-making.
Although this project focused on research, discovery, and concept exploration, it helped define a clear direction for what success should look like moving forward.
We identified key signals to measure impact, including:
More timely milestone updates from show teams
Less reliance on external planning tools
Increased leadership confidence in milestone data
Reduced manual follow-ups around schedule changes
Designing systems people want to maintain
This project taught me how deeply design is tied to incentives and trust in large systems. Improving data quality required more than better visuals, it meant making the tool genuinely useful for the people responsible for maintaining it.
I also learned how to design within complex, long-running workflows where change must be introduced carefully. Balancing structure with flexibility, and designing for adoption rather than disruption, helped me think more holistically about how internal tools shape collaboration and decision-making over time.
Beyond my project, the summer was filled with moments that made the internship unforgettable:
Got an early look at in-progress Disney Animation films during studio screenings.
Made more than a few trips to Disneyland (perk of being nearby!).
Ended up growing a small community of matcha lovers by sharing and trying different matcha that people brought into the office