NBCUniversal Leadership & Management

Here, senior leaders meet on a quarterly basis and are engaged, asking good questions and driving their teams to deliver on their goals — and that’s unique. I think that’s something that’s very special about what we have here.

What’s a quotable hallmark of good management on your team — and how is it reinforced? 

A hallmark of strong management on our team is that our leaders are true experts in the work and lead by example. They never ask teams to do something they have not personally mastered, and they show up when it matters most.

During Sunday Night Football in a divisional game, anytime operators and supervisors had a question our senior director of on-air operations was right there with them, answering, coaching, and standing on the floor during every break to ensure everything ran smoothly. That level of presence is the norm among our management. 

During the 2026 Winter Olympics, leaders flew in from California and Denver to be on‑site in Stamford, Connecticut so teams felt supported during a critical stretch. Earlier in the fall, our executive vice president of technical operations made the trip to Stamford for our first NBA game to show the same kind of support. Our executive team set the precedent that visible, hands-on leadership has a huge impact. Now, it’s our turn to carry that forward. We love the work, we love these teams, and we believe in being present because we experienced first-hand how meaningful that leadership was to us.

Which forum or ritual keeps priorities and expectations clear?

We rely on a few core forums and rituals to keep priorities and expectations clear, and it truly takes all of them working together.

At the organizational level, I host a quarterly all-hands that brings together our four major sites: Los Angeles, Denver, 30 Rock in New York City and Stamford. Each of my leaders also runs monthly all-hands with their respective teams to reinforce focus areas and keep everyone aligned.

Within any given month, I review the business, the product portfolio and our AI operations work. I’m always assessing whether these meetings still add value, whether the format needs to evolve or whether something should be consolidated to reduce meeting fatigue. Even with all of that in mind, having regular cadences remains essential. They allow us to reiterate priorities, drive accountability, validate or challenge roadmaps, and share organization-wide updates.

One of the first things I did after restructuring global media operations was evaluate our meeting rhythms and attendees to streamline where we could and better align now that we operate as one organization. From there, we expanded into a more outward-facing business portfolio cadence, giving stakeholders like Peacock and NBC Sports a 24/7 operational view of reliability trends, incident volume, outages and service performance.

A longstanding ritual that continues to be invaluable, originally set by our leadership team, is our daily cross-site operational engineering review. Every morning, we align on planned maintenance, discuss any outages from the previous day, and ensure we are protecting critical events and avoiding unnecessary touches to gear. It remains one of the most effective forums we have for keeping everyone in sync on what the day ahead looks like.

What part of the strategy excites people — and what metric shows progress?

What excites people most about our strategy is how clearly it connects to the metric that defines our credibility: reliability. We are a metrics-driven organization, and reliability is the standard that has earned the trust of every business we support, especially as live sports grow in scale, complexity and visibility.

In our on-air environment, we hold ourselves to “five nines of reliability,” a bar no one else in the industry sets. Five nines means 99.999 percent reliability, allowing virtually no room for failure in live, on‑air systems. In media operations, we target four nines, which means that out of 10,000 fulfilled assets, only one can have an error. These metrics resonate because they are ambitious and meaningful, and they represent a promise we make to our partners.

What makes this even more motivating is that in 2025, we hit those marks. We achieved five nines on air and four nines in media operations. That reinforces our progress and the importance of staying focused, because the moment we stop protecting reliability is the moment we risk losing the trust we have worked so hard to build.