Leading a Multi Year Devices–AWS Transformation: Bringing Stability, Alignment, and Lasting Experience Mechanisms
Leading a Multi Year Devices–AWS Transformation: Bringing Stability, Alignment, and Lasting Experience Mechanisms
Due to the confidential nature of this program, I cannot share specific design concepts or further details.
During my time in Amazon Devices, I supported several complex initiatives, including a multi year Devices and AWS partnership to replace a commercial system with more than one thousand features used across quality, planning, supply chain, operations, and reverse logistics. I joined as the first UX leader for this transformation, shaping the experience strategy, building the UX team, and establishing mechanisms that continued to guide the program long after I moved to AWS Core Services.
The initiative was deeply technical, engineering led, and highly distributed across two business units and two UX teams. The early phases also took place during COVID, which introduced emotional strain, unpredictable availability, and added challenges for a globally distributed team.
When I took ownership, the program faced several obstacles that threatened customer trust and long term success:
The Devices organization had only one UX Designer and no UX leadership.
The AWS partner team had Designers but lacked a UX Manager to provide alignment and continuity.
Requirements were being defined without research, or customer experience input.
Conflicting priorities across Devices and AWS created misalignment and fragmented workflows.
Early design debt and usability gaps began to accumulate.
COVID added stress, grief, and personal challenges for multiple team members.
The program needed stable leadership, stronger UX advocacy, consistent patterns, scalable research mechanisms, and a more sustainable team culture.
I served as the first UX leader for this multi year initiative. My responsibility was to stabilize the program, support Designers across both organizations, elevate UX influence in an engineering led environment, build team capacity, and create mechanisms that could guide hundreds of workflows across multiple years of development.
My goal was to bring clarity, continuity, and customer centered thinking to a program operating in high ambiguity and constant change.
I established predictable working rhythms, clarified decision ownership, and documented historical context so new team members could integrate quickly. This was critical during COVID, when unforeseen personal challenges frequently affected availability. By providing steady leadership, I ensured the initiative continued to move forward without losing alignment.
I reframed conversations around customer mental models, user trust, and business impact. This shifted teams away from feature checklists and toward long term experience outcomes. As trust grew, UX became a strategic partner rather than a support function.
I advocated for increased investment and grew the Devices UX team from one Designer to a multi member team that included a dedicated UX Researcher. I also mentored Designers on the AWS side to ensure shared standards and a consistent UX vision across organizations.
To ensure experience quality for a product with hundreds of workflows, I introduced mechanisms that complemented the program’s long term roadmap:
Customer Satisfaction tracking integrated into the Product Development Process
A design debt log that made gaps visible and prioritized
Standardized interaction patterns for consistency across the portfolio
Research operations through UserZoom and Qualtrics to scale insights
Monthly cross team design showcases to build visibility and alignment
These mechanisms created the structure the team needed to operate confidently and consistently in a complex environment.
COVID created emotional and logistical strain. I fostered a supportive environment, encouraged Designers to communicate changing capacity early, protected them from unnecessary churn, and celebrated incremental progress to maintain morale. This helped the team stay grounded and connected during a difficult period.
Maintained continuity across two UX teams and two engineering organizations, providing steady leadership throughout high turnover and shifting priorities.
Mentored Designers on both the Devices and AWS sides, ensuring shared expectations and raising the quality of decision making across the program.
Secured resources to expand the UX team, built onboarding pathways, and created guidance that helped new Designers contribute quickly.
Introduced scalable mechanisms, including CSAT tracking, design debt logs, standardized patterns, and research systems that remain in use well beyond my tenure.
Supported the emotional well being of the team during COVID by creating safe spaces for transparency, balancing workloads, and reinforcing stability.
The program progressed steadily despite COVID, turnover, and resource limitations.
UX became a trusted strategic partner, influencing priorities and guiding product direction.
The UX team grew in size, maturity, and confidence across both organizations.
Research, pattern systems, and design debt tracking became widely adopted and integrated into monthly business reviews.
Experience consistency improved significantly across hundreds of dependent workflows.
The mechanisms I created continued to guide the program more than two years after my transition to AWS Core Services.
This initiative showed me the power of stable leadership in environments with high ambiguity and long time horizons. By providing clarity, empathy, and scalable mechanisms, I helped two UX teams navigate a complex, multi organization transformation and build a foundation that continues to strengthen the program today. The experience reinforced my belief that lasting impact in UX leadership comes from investing in people, aligning teams across boundaries, and creating systems that outlive any single individual.