Case Study
Madison Square Garden: building the digital product function
Douglas Cirillo was Director of Product Operations at Madison Square Garden from 2012 to 2016, promoted from Senior Project Manager. He built the digital product function there and ran it as one operating model across 29+ websites and 4+ native apps. He proposed and led a $4M replatform and managed the operating and capital budgets behind it. Digital ticket sales for the Rockettes and Radio City Music Hall grew 400%, and MSG GO, the streaming service he led, was a New York Emmy nominee for Technical Achievement.
The situation
MSG’s brands each ran their own digital properties: the Knicks, the Rangers, the Liberty, the Rockettes, Radio City Music Hall, and the arena itself, on disjointed, aging platforms. Every property ran on its own platform, with its own developers, hosting, and owning team.
What I built
I built one product function out of the fragments: one vision, one operating model, centralized operations across 29+ websites and 4+ native apps. In 2015 I wrote the strategy to consolidate the site portfolio and retire the legacy platforms on a published schedule, and moved analytics into one repository, so every property reported the same way. I proposed and led a $4M replatform and managed the operating and capital budgets. On the app side, we launched MSG GO, the streaming and video service, alongside apps for the Knicks, Rangers, and Liberty.
The results
Digital ticket sales for the Rockettes and Radio City Music Hall grew 400%. MSG GO, which I led, was a New York Emmy nominee.
MSG is where the pattern started. A former MSG technology leader recruited me to Sotheby’s.