Product minds: Kaliel Roberts, Chief Product Officer, Crunchyroll

In this new series, Product Minds, we speak with Kaliel Roberts, CPO at Crunchyroll. Join us as we unravel Kaliel's background, her rituals, and her obstacles as a product leader.

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Background into Kaliel and her experience in product

I’m the Chief Product Officer for Crunchyroll, a global anime brand that serves a passionate community of fans in more than 200 countries and territories. I lead the company’s product, engineering, customer experience, ad operations, and user experience.

Since joining in 2020, I have led a global platform unification, built an in-house, diverse engineering expert team, and launched numerous products, services, and experiences for anime fans.

Biggest learnings from leading entertainment-based products

A piece of advice I can share from my time at Crunchyroll is to deeply know your audience (both your existing audience and your target/growth audience) and to also remember that there is no “one size fits all” approach when it comes to embracing content online.

Early in my career while at CNET, Yahoo, and Discovery, we focused on short form video. At Discovery, we split our time between short form while also focusing on building platforms for the long-form linear TV offering. One thing that surprised me when I built the direct-to-consumer apps at Discovery was how easy it was to increase engagement around long form by using recommendation systems to personalize content. I spent most of my career trying to increase session time by 20%, (which is around 32 seconds, for context). With long form, it’s easy to increase session time by 60 minutes.

What’s been your biggest most recent challenge?

Competition for viewer time continues to be a challenge as fans engage with social media, gaming, and traditional content. Still, it also presents Crunchyroll with a great opportunity to be innovative, both through new features we offer and through the ways we interact with and engage fans.

What do you do to unwind from work

Unplug with my family.

What’s the best resource/book you can recommend for product managers?

It depends on where you are in your career, but the book I’m enjoying right now is James Clear’s “Atomic Habits.”  One of his quotes I found quite interesting is, “You do not rise to the level of your goals.  You fall to the level of your systems.”  We all have aspirational goals we’d like to achieve, but what’s most important are the systems in place to help us achieve them.