Scaling UX Across AWS Core Services: Growing a Bar-Raising, AI-Ready Design Organization
Scaling UX Across AWS Core Services: Growing a Bar-Raising, AI-Ready Design Organization
When I joined the central Customer Experience organization at AWS, UX was still establishing its influence across the company. AWS had only recently formalized UX as part of the product lifecycle, and many of the mechanisms needed for enterprise-scale design maturity were still developing. I stepped into an environment with large, revenue-defining services such as EC2, Lightsail, SNS, SQS, MQ, and AWS Backup, all carrying years of UX debt, fragmented patterns, and inconsistent customer workflows.
My responsibility was twofold. I needed to raise the UX bar across services that millions of customers depend on every day. At the same time, I needed to prepare the team for AWS-wide work, more complex cross-service experience problems, and the emerging expectations created by AI-powered workflows. I focused on strengthening design judgment, building mechanisms the team could rely on, and developing designers into strategic partners who could think beyond individual services.
Designers needed to support very different personas, from Lightsail’s entry-level customer to EC2’s enterprise-scale user managing thousands of compute resources.
Years of UX debt created accessibility gaps, outdated workflows, and inconsistent patterns across services.
Shifting priorities, reorg cycles, and a hiring freeze required clear mechanisms to ensure stability and maintain quality.
Designers needed to strengthen influence skills to partner effectively with engineering and product leaders.
Growing interest in AI across AWS required the team to build capability in predictive, adaptive, and anticipatory experience design.
A central part of my leadership was shifting designers from providing service-specific support to identifying experience problems that span AWS. I guided designers to recognize patterns across EC2, Messaging, and Backup and to propose solutions that improved customer journeys that involved multiple services.
I supported this shift through structured mechanisms such as cross-service journey mapping, portfolio-level design reviews, and discussions focused on predictive, adaptive, and anticipatory experiences. I also mentored designers in building narratives that addressed AWS-wide challenges. As a result, designers who once focused narrowly on individual service roadmaps began shaping experiences that connected modernization, compute, and license cost management.
My leadership in AWS Transform, Microservice Extractor, and Migration Hub Strategic Recommendations provided early insight into how AI would redefine customer expectations. I brought these lessons into Core Services and helped designers strengthen new mental models.
I guided designers to deepen their UX skills and build trust with stakeholders by grounding their decisions in customer intent and clear mental models. I helped them build adaptive design thinking by identifying where workflows needed to respond to customer context and goals across EC2, Messaging, and Backup. I introduced anticipatory thinking by helping the team understand when and how systems should take proactive action while maintaining human oversight and trust.
This combination of predictive, adaptive, and anticipatory thinking prepared the team to support both current-state experiences and future agentic workflows across AWS.
I created a pre-check review mechanism to help designers identify CX risks early, refine decision making, and strengthen problem framing before formal CX Bar Raising Reviews. This mechanism reduced rework and improved launch quality.
I established weekly Work In Progress reviews where designers shared early design concepts and received feedback across EC2, Lightsail, Backup, and Messaging. This created a learning culture and increased consistency across services.
I encouraged designers to participate in AWS-wide Bar Raising programs, which helped them learn how to evaluate experiences at scale and extend their influence beyond individual services.
UX debt was both a pain point and an opportunity for designers to build leadership skills. I organized design debt hackathons that helped designers partner with engineering to resolve long-standing issues. These sessions strengthened creativity, collaboration, and problem solving.
I introduced a structured debt tracking mechanism in Asana that required designers to articulate customer impact, scope, and business risk. This strengthened their ability to influence prioritization through clear narratives and alignment with product and engineering leaders.
AWS is a writing-first culture, and designers needed strong narrative skills to drive alignment. I created mechanisms that helped designers develop clear documentation for CX risk, experience reviews, product recommendations, and stakeholder updates.
I also introduced customer journey videos to help designers explain complex workflows visually, allowing them to influence senior stakeholders through both narrative clarity and compelling storytelling.
Designers grew from service-specific contributors into AWS-wide strategic thinkers.
UX quality improved across EC2, Lightsail, Backup, and Messaging through reliable, repeatable mechanisms.
Designers strengthened their influence through improved documentation and cross-functional communication.
Predictive, adaptive, and anticipatory design thinking prepared the team for AI-driven workflows.
Cross-functional collaboration increased due to early UX engagement and consistent design practices.
Designers gained ownership, confidence, and influence across AWS.
Leading UX for AWS Core Services required stabilizing the present while preparing the team for an AI-driven future. Through mechanisms, clarity, and cross-service judgment, I helped build a team capable of supporting AWS’s most foundational services and contributing meaningfully to emerging AI experience design.