Building Across Platforms: One Product, Many Surfaces

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# Building Across Platforms: One Product, Many Surfaces

At MX Player, I led products across Connected TVs, Desktop Web, Mobile Web, and even Jio feature phones. Each platform had different constraints, different user behaviors, and different measures of success. Here's what I learned about building one product across many surfaces.

Context Changes Everything

The same user watches content differently on each platform:

Mobile: Short sessions, often interrupted, vertical scroll browsing

TV: Lean-back experience, longer sessions, remote-based navigation

Desktop: Multi-tab behavior, often background viewing

Feature phones: Data constraints, limited storage, different demographics A feature that delights on mobile might frustrate on TV. A design that works on desktop might be unusable with a remote.

The Cross-Team Challenge

Building for multiple platforms means working with teams across geographies. For the Jio phone launch, I collaborated with teams in India and China simultaneously. The coordination overhead was significant, but the potential reach — 2 million new users — made it worthwhile.

What helped:

Clear ownership boundaries — Who decides what on each platform

Shared success metrics — Aligned incentives across teams

Regular syncs — Time zone challenges are real, but solvable

Platform-Specific Wins

Some of my most impactful work came from platform-specific optimizations:

Android TV: Changing the homepage banner from an indicator to a thumbnail generated 1.5x higher Watch Time. Small design change, significant behavior shift.

Desktop Web: Refining the recommendation algorithm increased click-to-stream by 10% and Watch Time by 7%. Same algorithm principles, but tuned for desktop browsing patterns.

VIDAA OS: Launching on a new TV operating system meant reaching 150K active connected devices in India. New platform, new opportunity.

The Core Product Question

The hardest question in cross-platform development: what stays consistent, and what adapts?

My framework:

Consistent: Core value proposition, content library, personalization engine

Adaptive: Navigation patterns, UI components, feature prioritization The goal is that users recognize the product regardless of platform, but never feel like they're using a poorly adapted version.

Scaling Yourself

Building for multiple platforms forced me to scale my own impact. I couldn't be in every detail of every platform. Learning to set context, trust teams, and focus on cross-cutting decisions was essential growth.

That's perhaps the biggest lesson: cross-platform product management is as much about people coordination as it is about product design.

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Sai Vamsi G was part of the September 2025 cohort at Curious PM, alongside 13 other talented participants.