When I joined Comcast, their remotes were designed by outside vendors, and the remotes had a seemingly endless amount of buttons. Apple had recently come out with their first Apple TVs - and Xfinity’s remote, dubbed the “silver bullet”, was often mocked in comparison.

At the time, Xfinity was working with an outside agency on a more modern remote, with a smaller amount of buttons - but still overloaded.

My role quickly became to grow our in-house expertise, build bridges for design partnership, and shape a remote already underway. Through these efforts I played a key part in delivering our first voice remote to customers - which has since shipped millions of units, and enabled billions of utterances from Xfinity’s & their partners customers.

Through years of building bridges of collaboration, and getting to know Xfinity users we did several rounds of prototypes, as well as releasing innovative remotes to market. More than a half of dozen versions of concept approaches were explored in the last ten years, with five remotes being brought to market, winning several awards for Red Dot, iF and an Emmy along the way.