Amazon
Two years after joining Amazon in 2016, I took over managing the Amazon India customer experience design team in Bangalore. Led the team to deliver designs for the end-to-end shopping experience for the amazon.in retail website, as well as native apps for iOS and Android. Transitioned to UX Design Manager, to lead a team of 7 designers at Amazon in Scotland. Built consumer-grade tools for talent management used by Amazon employees worldwide
Overview
Until early 2018, Amazon India was focused on exclusively addressing shopper frustrations in India. By mid-2018, product leadership’s charter had extended to launch worldwide, features built in India. Design moved from an embedded model to a centralised partnership model (India Experience Group). I stepped up to manage the 6-member India Customer Experience design team. We designed and maintained the end-to-end shopping experience (ShopX) on Amazon.in and native apps for Android and iOS. We also supported content, video and voice innovation projects. Some of the challenges facing the design team at the time were:
- US-based teams were focused on North America. They built primarily for desktop, and India needed a mobile-first approach
- Category teams in India wanted more autonomy to build category-specific experiences and less dependence on the ShopX product team
- Product teams focused on their individual roadmaps and worked in silos
- Processes, design systems and tech did not scale to keep pace with the faster go-to-market cadence in India
- The design effort was getting duplicated across core shopping CX and category teams. Work intake was ad-hoc and created churn for designers
Need of the hour
- Ensure engagement with design at the product roadmap planning stage
- Drive better collaboration between category and ShopX design pods
- Provide early visibility to stakeholders, partners and leaders into cross-team product initiatives
Played a prominent role in helping the IXG design org address these challenges;
🔧 Process & ops
- Helped refine the design process to make it more people-centred, data-driven, inclusive
- Assisted in hiring a UX Program Manager and creating a standardised mechanism for UX project intake
- Helped streamline cross-functional collaboration mechanisms with partners in India and worldwide teams
- Introduced exploratory design sprints for quarterly roadmap planning
- Established a regular cadence of leadership design reviews at the IXG level, as well as cross-pod design critiques
🧁 Ethos & culture
- Helped negotiate with product leadership to establish an open-plan design studio
- Contributed to defining and setting up a rewards & recognition program for designers and researchers
- Introduced a wall of fame for product launches
- Planned and facilitated Friday lunch and learn sessions, quarterly design operations planning off-sites as well as team outings
- Hosted Amazon Conflux Design Conference, Bangalore chapter 2019
⭐ Talent & growth
- Maintained a pipeline of design candidates and ran regular portfolio review sessions with the team
- Co-ordinated IXG-wide design hiring events with the talent acquisition team
- Coached & mentored my team to develop competencies in strategic product thinking and cross-pod collaboration
- Set up mechanisms for structured but informal bi-weekly 1:1’s, weekly team stand-ups, monthly and quarterly career conversations
- Managed promotions of 6 designers and exits of two designers
Amazon India innovations
Apart from IXG-wide contributions, my own charter as a design manager was to deliver on product goals of the India Customer Experience product org. My team contributed to several product innovations some of which are described in the design case studies.
Case studies
🛒 A futuristic Amazon lifestyle app for India
👠 Re-imagined Amazon product detail pages
🛍️ Enhanced CX for offers & promotions
Impact
Our work significantly contributed to increased conversion surpassing revenue targets year-on-year. We delivered incremental value over time through sustained launches of feature enhancements across the shopping funnel.
Several initiatives between 2018 and 2020 involved a quick design turnaround but yielded disproportionate business impact. Some examples include; improvements in Today’s Deals card on the homepage, better presentation of affordability (offers & promotions) across the funnel, making detail pages modular and less verbose, introducing guided search, and making adding payment methods easier during checkout. We also crafted customer-backwards, strategic north-star visions of end-to-end shopping journeys. We re-imagined discovery and navigation, search, product evaluation, purchase, fashion, etc. These design-driven initiatives guided product teams to focus on what customer problems to solve and provided a blueprint that helped inform product roadmaps. My team played a significant part in influencing the core shopping design and product teams in Amazon HQ (Seattle, USA) to fully support innovation initiatives in India.
Next play: Amazon Scotland
In mid-2020, in the middle of the Covid pandemic, I transitioned to the Amazon Talent Management team in Scotland.
- Led a 6-member culturally diverse team of 5 designers and 1 researcher to build a consumer-grade, holistic talent management platform, radically enhancing talent evaluations, promotions, compensation, and exits to serve 1M+ Amazon employees worldwide
- Guided the team to adopt service design methodologies like service blueprinting to solve for diverse teams, multiple stakeholders, and hundreds of disconnected processes
- Facilitated remote workshops and design sprints, fostering high morale and a strong sense of purpose to deliver impactful work together through the pandemic