About
Phil Getzen
Product leader turned strategic advisor, helping organizations make better product and technology decisions.
Background
12 years shipping products at scale
Disney Entertainment & ESPN Product & Technology
Seattle, WAMar 2019 – Aug 2025
Director, Product Management
Feb 2022 – Aug 2025Led ESPN Video Experiences Team: 5 PMs, mobile/web/living room platforms, 70K+ live events annually.
- Defined and drove ESPN's full DTC fan experience: browse and search enhancements, Streampicker and StreamCenter for engagement and retention, Interactive CTV (Fantasy, Stats, Betting) for the platform launch, and personalized content rows
- Grew video minutes 92.4% and MAU 75.3% across mobile, web, living room, linear, and streaming from 2019 to 2025
- Developed and executed a 5-year product roadmap aligned to company OKRs; built equitable hiring practices adopted as Disney Technology standard
Senior Manager, Product Management
Mar 2021 – Feb 2022Expanded ESPN Video Experiences team from 3 to 5 PMs while maintaining hands-on IC ownership of product strategy and delivery.
- Achieved 22.6% YoY MAU growth and 44% increase in minutes watched through cross-platform expansion of sports and live programming
Senior Product Manager
Mar 2019 – Mar 2021Founded Video Experiences team; led full UX redesign of live and on-demand video.
- Drove 505% ESPN+ subscriber growth in first 2 years and 14% MAU lift through UX redesign
- Led Fox Sports Netherlands migration to ESPN and expansion to Comcast X1, Cox, and Facebook Portal, anchoring a $95M advertising deal
Feb 2016 – Mar 2019
Product Manager II
Feb 2016 – Mar 2019Delivered consumer and infrastructure initiatives that drove 5x video viewership growth over 3 years.
- Shipped unified video player across iOS, Android, and web serving 100M+ daily users
- Delivered live video infrastructure supporting Thursday Night Football; led A/B testing and analytics programs that guided product decisions
Microsoft
Jan 2014 – Feb 2016
Program Manager
Jan 2014 – Feb 2016Built enterprise cloud solutions using Microsoft Intune for Fortune 500 clients.
- Designed and shipped enterprise cloud solutions for Fortune 500 clients; led structured discovery workshops to define requirements and tailor implementations
Ventures & Projects
Consulting Practice (Founder, 2025–Present): Strategic product consulting helping B2B SaaS, media, and consumer software organizations navigate build-vs-buy decisions, prioritization, and scaling.
BookOwl (Founder & Solo Developer, 2025–Present): Free iOS and web reading tracker. 1,200 users in 5 weeks with $0 marketing spend; 50% D30 retention. 5.0 stars on the App Store. Shipped as sole developer.
Metric Magic (Founder, 2025–Present): B2B SaaS connecting 7 analytics platforms into a unified schema with natural language querying. Currently in waitlist.
Gique (Co-Founder & VP, 2013–2019): Non-profit delivering STEAM education at Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester; published peer-reviewed research on educational intervention impact.
What this means
For clients
I've lived your problems
Build vs. buy vs. partner? At Disney, I negotiated platform deals with Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, and Meta. I've evaluated RFPs with partners like Snap for major features and worked with leadership to recommend buy vs. partner approaches when 8-figure decisions were on the line.
Unit economics? At ESPN, we worked through complex tradeoffs between maintaining and growing our TV Everywhere business while expanding DTC offerings with ESPN+ and ESPN Direct.
Feature bloat? At Twitter, I worked with partner teams to effectively prioritize the highest-value video products that aligned with overall company goals, saying no to features that didn't move the needle despite internal pressure.
I know what works at scale
There's a difference between a feature that works for 1,000 users and one that works for 100 million users. I've shipped both. At Twitter, I launched a unified video player framework impacting 100M+ daily active users. At ESPN, I led products that scaled to millions of concurrent viewers during major live events. I know which architectural decisions matter at which stage, when to take on technical debt vs. when to pay it down.
I understand your constraints
Mid-market organizations don't have Disney's resources or Twitter's extensive engineering teams. You can't afford to build everything in-house, but you also can't afford to bet wrong on platform partners. I help you make strategic choices that fit your actual constraints, not idealized versions of what you wish you had.
I've worked across verticals
Enterprise B2B (Microsoft), consumer social (Twitter), streaming media (Disney/ESPN), consumer mobile apps (TempoRun), and education non-profits (Gique). This breadth means I can translate lessons from one domain to another, and I know when advice from one vertical doesn't apply to yours.
Origin story
Why I do this work
After 12 years building products at Disney, Twitter, and Microsoft, plus founding two companies, I saw a gap in the market. Mid-market organizations need strategic product guidance, but most consultants either come from pure tech backgrounds (strong on algorithms, weak on product strategy) or pure business backgrounds (strong on frameworks, weak on technical reality).
Having lived in both worlds, I can talk to your engineering team about platform integration strategies and your executive team about competitive positioning. I know which features create moats vs. which ones are table stakes, because I've built video experiences and infrastructure at massive scale.
Most importantly: I've seen what happens when companies rush to adopt new technology because competitors are, without thinking through unit economics, technical debt, or whether the technology actually solves the user problem. I started this consulting practice to help organizations avoid those mistakes, and to bring the same strategic rigor to technology decisions that we brought to product development at Disney, Twitter, and Microsoft.
My advantage isn't that I know more about any one technology than anyone else. It's that I've shipped products to hundreds of millions of users, made build-vs-buy decisions with 8- and 9-figure consequences, and learned when to say "no" to technology for its own sake. That's what I bring to client organizations.