My roles

Founding designer to leader. Across product areas. From idea to launch.

Starting with the first robust illustration of the end-to-end product experience for Amazon executive leadership, I helped define the product paradigm; led the design of the tables, app builder, app runtime, and automations; and was asked to be the UX manager of a cross-functional team of UX, product, visual, and brand designers responsible for growth, onboarding, architecture, tables, automations, integrations, and the design system.

Customer problems

Inefficient workflows. Out-of-sync data. Inadequate out-of-the-box solutions.

Our team was created to expand AWS’s customer base beyond developers to non-technical business users. Their workflows are specific and complex. Custom solutions usually are not prioritized onto IT roadmaps. As a result, they get work done manually, through disconnected tools, leading to data discrepancies and collaboration challenges.

Product strategy

Single integrated platform. Powerful custom apps. Team building and building teams.

Amazon Honeycode enables non-technical business users to collaborate with their teams in real-time, on live data, wherever they are, through seamless web and native app experiences. The growth strategy creates a flywheel where builders demonstrate the value of custom apps to app users who themselves become builders of additional custom apps for their teammates.

Stealth alpha

Designing with a platform mentality. Across tables and app builder.

First, we built a robust, resilient platform that worked at scale. I designed foundational primitives that unblocked customer and platform challenges. Portable, consistent interaction patterns for new data formats visualized relational data, the biggest obstacle for business users. My team also defined the object and layout model that enabled rendering dynamic content in apps.

Public beta

Streamlining workflows. By packaging primitives together.

For launch, we radically reduced the complexity to build apps. My team leveraged deep technical knowledge of the platform to create UX that eliminated the need for business users to understand complex formulas and data constructs. Now, they could use built-in properties. And start apps even in the container app.

Paradigm shift

Simplifying app building through abstraction and smartness.

After launch, we learned that we could do more for business users. I led the team that defined the new vision. We re-architected three builder experiences into an integrated, intelligent interface with new information architecture, smarter interaction patterns, more communicative UI states, and more built-in features.

Impact

Our work is the basis for AWS’s next generation of no-code productivity services.

Amazon Honeycode validated AWS’s bet that its new target customer, non-technical business users, would value building custom solutions themselves. During the journey from confidential product idea to Tier 1 service launch, the team built robust capabilities and established interaction patterns that served as the launchpad for additional product concepts and subsequent AWS productivity services.

Reflections

I experienced the rush of 0-to-1, learned a new way of designing, and uncovered superpowers of resilience and opinionatedness.

When the team formed, there was a vision, but also extreme ambiguity: no requirements, no technology, few processes, and no shortage of ideas. Incredible leaders and partners modeled and mentored me in the power of vision and multi-faceted rationale. This context made me an opinionated platform designer, powered by the stamina to crank through seemingly endless use case permutations and deeply understand the system, where it breaks, and if/how to iterate it.