Additional shout out to those who came and went as the platform grew and evolved: Rich, Diana, Lily, & Troy ✨

Before MyDisneyToday

Disney’s internal employee intranet was originally built on WordPress—maintained as separate, standalone sites for just a handful of brands (also referred to as “business units”). This fragmented approach created significant challenges such as:

• Disconnected experiences – Employees across brands had vastly different digital environments, leading to confusion and inefficiency.
• Inconsistent and duplicative messaging – Important updates were often repeated or missed due to lack of centralized communication.
• Unequal access to opportunities – The experience and available resources varied widely depending on your business unit or location.
• Limited scalability – The infrastructure could not support enterprise-wide growth or evolving business needs.
• Static, outdated content – Without dynamic features or fresh updates, the intranet quickly became stale and underutilized.
• Low employee engagement – A lack of personalization and functionality made it hard to attract or retain employees.
• No technical ownership – With third-party platforms controlling updates and fixes, we had limited ability to evolve or optimize the experience.
• Inconsistent design and poor UX – There was no unified design system, resulting in a clunky component structure and brand misalignment.

The Solution

With a pre-existing contract, ServiceNow offered MyDisneyToday a chance to serve all employees under one roof and gave our team the ability to custom build the entire experience. This extended many benefits, such as:

• Refactoring navigation – preliminary research suggested side navigation as employees’ preferred method of travel.
• Incorporating a core design system – initially built and maintained in Sketch, we created a foundation. I migrated this system to Figma shortly after launch.
• Targeting the experience – to accommodate brands and locations, we created a hierarchy that targeted the experience. For instance, a Disney+ employee in New York has different needs compared to a Hulu employee in Santa Monica when it comes to news, events, and resources.
• Autonomy and ownership – moving to a completely customized platform gave us the ability to address fixes and enhancements in two-week sprints.
• Empowering brand admins – alongside the employee experience, we designed and built an “admin” experience where content creators and brand managers could publish content on their own.