Product Design Director, Monterosa
Monterosa Interaction Cloud: Designing the SaaS engine behind global live experiences
Turning one-off TV apps into a global platform for live audience participation
Context and Challenge
When I joined Monterosa as its first designer, every interactive event, from The X Factor to UEFA Euro, required a bespoke, one-off app.
Producers wanted creative freedom, but what they truly needed was reliability at scale. The risk of failure in live studios and control rooms was existential: millions of people would see it.
Our goal was to turn scattered second-screen builds into a unified, reusable platform that could power any live experience, on any screen, anywhere in the world.
We needed to design a product that producers could trust in the most high-pressure environments.
Insight
Producers didn’t want limitless design options. They wanted control, predictability, and safety.
Success depended on confidence, the feeling that nothing could go wrong live on air.
That insight shaped a product built as an orchestration system rather than a design tool, giving users guardrails, validation, and clarity.
Approach
Built a low-code, reusable framework
We turned common engagement patterns such as polls, predictions, ratings, and leaderboards into configurable “Experience Cards” that client could assemble in minutes.
Designed for confidence under pressure
Dark UI optimised for production galleries
Live preview that mirrored what audiences saw
“Arming” and “safe-launch” workflows
Clear status indicators for anything going live
Everything was built to avoid the single biggest risk: pressing the wrong button during a broadcast.
Created a reusable experience engine
The platform enabled teams to build once and deploy everywhere: apps, web, stadium screens, broadcast graphics, and social integrations.
Added real-time insight
Participation dashboards gave producers minute-by-minute visibility, helping them adjust pacing, test formats, and respond to audience behaviour live on air.
Balanced flexibility with predictability
Allowed producers to innovate inside defined boundaries, ensuring everything built was safe, scalable, and operationally sound.
Outcomes
Scaled from an internal toolkit to a SaaS platform powering over 2+ billion interactions annually and reaching more than 100 million unique users worldwide.
Reduced app deployment time from weeks to hours, lowering production risk and cost.
Adopted by major broadcasters and sports organisations: ITV, BBC, NBC, Formula 1, UEFA, World Rugby, and more.
Secured early investment by proving commercial scalability beyond one-off events.
Became the engine behind global formats such as The X Factor, Love Island, Roland-Garros, and the Olympic Games, making real-time fan participation a repeatable part of production.
The Interaction Cloud demonstrated that great product design doesn’t constrain creativity.
It scales it, turning one-off ideas into a repeatable, global system for live audience engagement.