The art of engineering at Disney

Until high school, Kathleen de Paolo ’87 was drawn more to the arts than she was to STEM. She studied ballet and classical guitar, devoured books, and did art projects with her grandmother, a painter. 

It’s in the arts that she sees a through line to her current role as vice president of engineering at Disney, where de Paolo leads a team of innovators skilled in computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and mathematics — paired with a pull toward creativity — as they explore emerging technologies for the company’s parks, experiences, and products segment.

For instance, when guests stay at Walt Disney World resorts and interact with the “Hey Disney” smart speakers in each room, they’re engaging with the work of the emerging technology team. 

Same goes for the interactive Quantum Core device at the center of “Avengers: Quantum Encounter,” a Disney cruise ship dining experience featuring demos of “superhero technologies” by Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp. With the Quantum Core device, dining guests experience the illusion of shrinking and growing objects Ant-Man-style. 

De Paolo’s team also created many of the special effects and interactive elements behind Disney Uncharted Adventure, an interactive scavenger hunt first introduced on the Disney cruise ship Wish. Guests aboard select Disney Cruise Line ships can join the adventure with their mobile devices. 

Disney’s emerging technology team engineer the invisible solutions that power countless elements of its vast world. To do so, they keep an eye on concepts with edges yet to be defined, such as artificial intelligence and computer vision, and go beyond neatly packaged, mainstream solutions. This pursuit of innovation in the name of immersive storytelling drew de Paolo to Disney in 2015.

We sat down with de Paolo, who lives in Solana Beach, California, to revisit her journey: how she built a solid foundation in engineering as an undergraduate in the Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, recognized the power of storytelling as an engineer, and embraced career twists and turns to land in a magical spot.

You had a love for the arts early on. So when did you become interested in engineering?

Once I got into high school, aside from some really inspiring teachers, I think what drew me to engineering — and STEM in general — was the precision of the discipline. There was something very elegant about it, the way the pieces all fit together. Frankly, you could come to the right answer, versus in the arts, where you can keep refining forever. It turns out that engineering is more like the arts in that way — you're always making tradeoffs and nothing is ever perfect — but at the time, getting a right answer or a wrong answer appealed to my perfectionist tendencies. So I knew in high school that engineering was where I wanted to go.

I had also grown up with a love for aviation. My father was a fighter pilot turned commercial airline pilot. He and all his brothers flew, and I grew up around the airlines. As a little kid, I would go to the airport with him and sit in the cockpit, and he’d let me flip all the switches and hear all the sounds go. It was something that was always in my blood. So when aerospace engineering was offered as a discipline, it was kind of a no-brainer. Yes, of course I’m going to study that. My father was a huge inspiration for me.

How did that go, looking back on your time studying at Virginia Tech?

The biggest thing I got out of my education is the ability to learn and master a demanding discipline at depth. I would characterize my precollege education mostly as intensive liberal arts. In contrast, Virginia Tech was extremely theoretical and technically challenging. It’s understanding the excruciating math behind why these things work and really digging down to the fundamental physical principles behind how we do engineering today. That discipline — once you’ve got it, you can learn anything.

Can you tell me more about that “excruciating math?” What goes into mastering that?

Because the expectation at Virginia Tech was that we understand everything from first principles, it gave me an internal expectation to understand things deeply, and the perseverance to keep unpacking ideas, theories, and learnings — whatever the subject was — until I got to that point. I needed to understand not just the simplistic cause and effect of what I was doing, but all the second-order effects, or what I was doing underneath. That was really key in setting me up for the kinds of things that I would go on to do in my career. When I ended up at Qualcomm, which develops cutting-edge wireless technology, a lot of people came from that same mindset, so if you couldn’t answer those questions when they were asked, there was a potential disadvantage that was hard to overcome to be successful. That was required to build the innovative technology that we were trying to do there. 

After building that technology at Qualcomm for 22 years, what did you bring with you to Disney?

On the pure, technical side of things, it was: How do you build and maintain incredibly complex, novel systems in the world of technology, and how do you scale that out? I worked my way up starting with small, simple stuff, and just went bigger and bigger. Anyone in engineering management gets to the point where people under you have much deeper knowledge in the particular thing they’re doing, and yet you still have to be able to provide the right high-level direction, ask the right questions, and ensure what’s happening is exactly the right thing. It was the ability to engineer and then manage the development of these very complex ecosystems. 

I appreciate more and more, every year, the leaders that I had the incredible fortune to work under in the early days of Qualcomm. First, their deep, deep engineering excellence. They had walls of patents, and their sheer, raw intellectual horsepower was amazing, coupled with a rare servant-leader mentality. They really understood how to lead and manage top talent at scale and how to motivate people. They knew how to create reward structures to incentivize the kinds of results that they wanted. We as a leadership team made a massive investment in developing our people in a thoughtful way and ensuring they were set up for success. 

It was also their product thinking and engineering systems thinking. It was never about, “Hand me a spec and I’ll go code it.” It was like, “Hand me a problem statement, and I will figure out the solution to get you there — and in the process, help refine that problem statement.” All of that together, I can’t imagine a better way to learn how to do technology in the real world.

How does your Disney team approach that process of doing technology in the real world?

A former leader at Disney used to say, “If people see the technology, we’re not doing our job.” It’s always technology in service of the story. That’s a huge difference from a pure technology company, where the technology itself is the product. The common element, though, is: What is the problem statement? What are we trying to solve? Then we present different solutions and basically bring them into being.

My focus area at Disney has always been in the emerging technology space. It’s technology that is not yet mainstream, either in industry or at Disney. When something’s mainstream, it usually comes nicely packaged. Anybody with a basic software background can just pick it up and use it. They don’t need to understand the science behind why it works, they just need to understand and follow the documentation on how to use it. The emerging technologies have not gotten to that level yet. People are still trying to figure out: How exactly do we make this technology do what we need it to do? Is it even possible? That’s the space that my team and I work in.

What types of technology are capturing the interest of your team right now?

The all-too-obvious answer is AI, right? That’s the big buzz right now, and a ton of capital is being pumped into it, from startups to the big tech incumbents. There’s all sorts of news and talk about the hype cycle and whether we’re in a bubble. What I like to do with my team is focus on what we can control right now. We’ve been hands on with some of these newer-generation AI technologies, and what we can do right now is nowhere near what people are saying is the promise of this thing — just give it any problem and it has the solution. Maybe it gets there someday, but it’s not today.

But there are incredibly useful things that it can do right now. A lot of those useful things aren’t terribly sexy, but they’re valuable and I’m excited about them. Some of those things actually make a real difference and change the way we work. We’re now able to deliver more advanced experiences at scale that before, maybe you could afford to do one or two. Now, suddenly, you don’t have to hand craft something each time from scratch to account for tiny variations. You can create something that’s more generalizable, and then be able to use it across many nonidentical instances. We can move faster in delivering great experiences.

I’m excited about those baby steps and stepwise wins. And honestly, I think that’s how you eventually get to any big, impactful vision. Not necessarily overnight. There are a lot of steps along the way.

Looking back, what would you like your younger self, studying at Virginia Tech, to know?

One thing that I always tell students, or even people early in their careers that I mentor, is that there’s always so much stress around the questions of: What should I study? What job should I pick? Should I make this decision or that decision? They’re trying to get it perfect, so they’re kind of mapping out that journey. And you know, particularly in the world of technology, everything’s going to change. So really, the key piece is learning to learn. Once you pick something and master it in depth, it almost doesn’t matter what it is. Once you understand how to really get down to the root of something, you start to understand what questions need to be asked, and the questions that need to be asked can translate across different disciplines.

In my career, I studied aerospace engineering, which didn’t get deep into electrical engineering. When I made the transition over to Qualcomm, I basically had to teach myself electrical engineering on the job — which is not a trivial discipline. But it was possible. I was able to translate my education and very brief experience in the aerospace industry to be able to do that. 

It’s hard to even imagine what technologies are going to be in play by the time freshmen graduate, much less 10 years into their careers. Very few people are going to end up doing exactly the thing that they think they’re going to end up doing. And that’s okay. I would never have predicted, as I was in high school thinking, “I’m going to be an aerospace engineer and I’m going to design fighter planes,” that I would end up at The Walt Disney Company, after years doing electrical engineering, communications work, and commercial software at a company like Qualcomm. It’s been a fantastic journey. 

What insight have you gleaned on the value of “the story” from your time at Disney?

Even in technology — and I can say this with certainty, coming from Disney — storytelling matters. It’s a superpower no matter where you go, being able to bring people along on your thought process, to lead them toward the conclusions that you’re talking about. That’s something I think technical education doesn’t always really prepare people for, and it really makes a difference in terms of how effective you can be. I don’t remember who to attribute it to, but the quote I like is, “It’s better to be effective than to be right.” A lot of engineers — and I definitely fell into this — really focus on being right, because that’s what you learn in school. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be effective. Storytelling has a lot to do with bridging that gap.