Amazon

Design the Experience

How I spent more than a decade helping Amazon translate innovation into customer confidence during one of the most transformative periods in its history.

Making Complexity Feel Human

ABOUT

My relationship with Amazon began in 2012, long before I became an employee.

Amazon was already a large and rapidly growing company, but its internal brand and creative organization was still developing. At the same time, Amazon was becoming much more than a retailer.

It was building its own products.

Our agency began working directly with Brand and Marketing leadership during that transition, supporting early brand work and then moving deeply into product marketing and launch development around Kindle, Fire, and other emerging Amazon products and experiences.

The challenge wasn't simply launching new products.

It was helping customers understand what Amazon was becoming.

Sometimes making the promise real isn't about creating something new. It's about removing what's preventing the customer from believing it.

WHat I DId

  • I HELPED TRANSLATE INNOVATION INTO CUSTOMER UNDERSTANDING.

    Over nearly a decade, my agency partnered across multiple Amazon organizations, supporting initiatives ranging from Kindle and Kindle Fire to emerging Alexa experiences, Amazon Home, retail experiences, and product marketing programs.

    Every new product created a new question for customers:

    • Why does this exist?

    • How does it fit into my life?

    • Why should I trust it?

    Rather than treating those assignments as isolated campaigns, we focused on creating clear customer narratives that made increasingly complex products easier to understand and adopt.

  • I HELPED BUILD BRAND SYSTEMS WHILE THE ORGANIZATION WAS FINDING ITS VOICE.

    Amazon's internal creative organization was still growing during those years.

    Working closely with internal teams and senior leaders, our team helped develop design approaches, product storytelling, launch frameworks, and customer-facing experiences as Amazon learned how the retailer and Amazon's own products should speak to customers differently while still belonging to the same company.

    We were working inside a brand in motion. There wasn't always a centralized answer.

    Our job was often to understand where Amazon was headed, see around the corner, and create something appropriate for that moment while leaving enough room for the brand to continue evolving.

  • I EXPERIENCED THE BUSINESS FROM BOTH SIDES.

    Years later I joined Amazon as a Marketing Director, expecting to apply what I'd learned as an outside partner from inside the organization. Instead I found myself in a Heavy Bulky service organization, at the intersection of marketing, customer experience, operations, and analytics.

    The role wasn't ultimately aligned with my strengths, but it changed the way I think. Rather than building large campaigns, I learned to look for specific points of friction — places where customers were abandoning the buying journey — and build solutions around measurable behavior. I identified PDP language tied to stronger purchase intent, and developed a video placement initiative after finding higher conversion propensity on pages containing video.

  • What became possible

    • Built a long-term strategic and creative relationship with Amazon beginning in 2012.

    • Supported Amazon's evolution from retailer toward a broader product and technology brand.

    • Helped shape product launches and experiences across Kindle, Fire, Alexa, Home, and emerging initiatives.

    • Developed product narratives, launch systems, and customer-facing creative across multiple Amazon organizations.

    • Inside Amazon, used customer behavior to identify friction within the Heavy Bulky purchase journey.

    • Developed PDP content and video initiatives designed to increase customer confidence and purchase intent.

What AMAZON Taught Me

  • Amazon taught me the importance of planning, ownership, accountability, and measurable outcomes.

  • A great idea isn't enough. Strategy creates the boundaries and planning establishes what success and failure look like, but execution depends on understanding what's standing between the idea and the customer.

  • Strategy creates the boundaries. Planning establishes what success and failure look like. But execution depends on understanding what's standing between the idea and the customer.

FIND THE BLOCKERS. REMOVE THEM. THE IDEA GETS ITS CHANCE.