The Fierce Video editorial team is proud to present its third annual Emerging Leaders Awards, recognizing the brightest young professionals rising up the ranks of the streaming TV industry. Throughout the month of May we’ll be featuring these profiles with each of our finalists. We will announce the winners during our StreamTV Show with a live awards ceremony in Denver on June 6 at 7:30 p.m. MT. Not yet registered for the StreamTV Show, running June 6-8? Be sure to register now!
Katie Donatelli/Charter Communications:
Katie Donatelli is the director of content strategy and data enablement at Charter Communications. During her four years at Charter, Katie has driven the development of an analytical framework that informs how Charter’s video business evaluates feature level engagement within app experiences to continue to drive essential product and content strategy initiatives. Prior to Charter, she served as an online research strategist for Gutcheck and as an experience strategist at Wunderman DC. Katie earned a B.A. in economics from the Catholic University of America in 2013.
What her colleagues are saying:
"Katie perfectly blends a technical knowledge of how systems work and interact, along with a strong awareness of how those systems provide value to the business. She also exhibits the valuable behavior of listening carefully and asking thoughtful questions to identify exactly what each of her stakeholders needs, then balances those needs to deliver the maximum amount of possible value." - Matt Wagner, senior director of product at Charter
"Katie Donatelli exemplifies the definition of an energetic, meticulous and resilient leader. She has the ability to bring together people across organizations. Katie is one of my primary video stakeholders; she communicates effectively, plans work preemptively and has an empathic approach to issues. Her concise communication and effective conflict resolution creates the perfect stakeholder/enablement interaction and drives the success of the team." - Raquenal Garcia, senior director of data platforms and insights at Charter
Streaming Industry Q&A:
What streaming services do you subscribe to?
The better question is which ones I don't subscribe to! I think I subscribe to at least eight services currently – it’s how I stay up to speed on what is going on in the industry and watching the best content, of course. Right now the go-to services I'm using are HBO Max, Prime Video and Hulu.
Describe your biggest career highlight so far.
I had the opportunity to drive a cross-functional initiative that improved the measurement framework video experiments would use to define success. The original model was excellent at detecting significant macro trends. Our initiative allowed us to also track the impact of micro changes, which were previously difficult to measure. The really exciting part of this effort was that it was all grounded in customer journey metrics that illustrated how customers navigated through our application to get to their desired content, and it was built to continue to scale and flex for the future.
What has been your biggest career learning experience?
My biggest learning experience is grounded in not being afraid to take change head on. In my career at Charter, I have worked for multiple different teams throughout the video organization, ranging from technical, analytics-focused teams to teams emphasizing process to strategy teams. It has provided me with a unique perspective on how to get work done but also understand the big picture. Now that I am leading a team that has a wide range of skill sets and subject-matter expertise, I feel that the variety of experiences I have gathered over the years has really prepared me for the stage I am in right now.
What's next for you in terms of new challenges in streaming TV?
I am incredibly excited to be leading a content strategy and analytics team that is just as passionate about data and customer needs as I am. I am looking forward to continuing to crack the code on delivering personalized, relevant, data-driven experiences in the ever-evolving and competitive landscape that we operate in. But just having the data to know what we need to do is only half the battle; next is ensuring that we are able to seamlessly integrate the opportunities we are uncovering into our video experiences and not being afraid of the change, innovation and growth ahead.