Product Design - @Amazon Music: 3P Auto & Ubiquity.

Business Goals & Motivations:

• Run full stack design process for current and new B2B & B2C products within the Amazon Music ecosystem, focusing on seamless integrations with third-party (3P) partners, acquisition initiatives, visual improvements initiatives, and ubiquitous product features.

• Provide Amazon Music customers the best user experience for all device types and third party integrations - designing Feature Scalability for wearables, mobile, tablet, web, big screen (TV), and auto (car), implement and design Future Forward Features - reflecting day in the life of customers, Visual Improvements - play-states, functionality, AI features, Situational Use Cases - offline downloaded & purchased listening and engagement, and Own Design Initiatives - write PRFAQs, case studies, documentation, roadmaps, research plans, audits, and weekly team updates for visibility.

• Design and deliver UX & Product concepts that represent the leadership principles of Amazon. Be Customer Obsessed - deliver design solutions based on key design KPIs - customer satisfaction rates, engagement, and adoption. Think Big - deliver new and compelling concepts to solve differentiation, customer pain points, churn, and ROI of monthly users. Invent and Simplify - Discover & Define - competitive and market analysis for TAM SAM SOM, gather VOC and customer insights for product value and status, determine the pulse of trends towards visionary concepts, Design - iterate and create the happy path for customers, wireframe and create journeys, frameworks, and mockups of features, design systems and components, Bias for Action - communicate and collaborate with key stake holders, test iterations for validation, manage design with development relationships, review concepts and iterate based on leadership validations, Deliver Results - deliver design concepts for development, manage tickets and requests during prototyping phases, QA builds and deliverables for launch, prepare to garner insights from product use results.

Discover & Define:

• Combining the define and discover phases is a great way to start the design process. This often involved performing feature and product audits, gathering research metrics, and contextual customer goals to align with business goals.

• Researched the feature, project, and product KPIs, JTBDs, & VOC: customer satisfaction rate, engagement, and adoption to create the product narratives, understand customer personas, and define product fit. 

• Collaborated & Implemented the project image and standards review and discuss the direction, concepts, and documentation based on the discoveries. Move towards deciding concept as a solution to the problem.

Product Audit examples - Play-states, Overflow menu paths, Offline patterns and dead ends, etc.

Design Process:

• After completing the Discover and Define phases, it was time to move towards developing concepts, journeys, and narratives of the project, feature, or product. This includes wire-framing, low fidelity, high fidelity, user flows, personas, journey mapping, etc.

• Building a UX concept centered around the situational and actual customer pain points - navigation, IA Information architecture, feature adoption, business goals - acquisition, churn, engagement, etc., aesthetics, practicality, and intuition. Design the journey and highlight it with simplicity and intention use copy to help present the work contextually.

• Collaborated with key stakeholders, implementing feedback focused on leveraging the successfully designed solutions for the project, feature, or product goals. The goal is to iterate, iterate, iterate, design a solution that considers the full breadth of customer expectations, usability, accessibility, and business alignment. Review the design rigorously and diligently to reach timely meaningful conclusions and decisions. The next step is moving towards testing the design as an experiment to validate the design’s KPIs for development and delivering.

This is an example of the Design Process for a gamification project for early use acquisition.

Design Process - user journeys

Gamification Project - example of full user journey

Design Process:

• After reaching a solid iteration from the design phase, its time to present this work to key stakeholders of organization, including level 7 & 8 management, and level 10 leadership. This demands a solid presentation that answers potential and current questions around the problem and solution.

• Building a presentation to establish the solution narrative - highlight the campaign goals, market status, current offering, metrics, use cases - personas, problem, and designed solution.

• Collect feedback from key stakeholders and move towards an approval of the designed solution. Sometimes this means back to the drawing board, but I often found tremendous success when performing this phase of the design process.

Design Reviews - example of presentation slides to highlight Hot Topics for discussion Pros & Cons, call outs, and split decisions.

Design Process Cont. - example of Alexa On Mobile which is now the FAB button in Amazon Music today.

Design Process Cont. - Visual Improvements Initiative improving settings. This is an audit of the current settings combined with a journey towards the solution a more simplified and organized settings page.

Design Process Cont. - Improved settings final concept.

Design Process:

• Thinking Big - What if Amazon Music were different? How would Now Playing work? What would the Home Page experience be? Here are some examples of explorations into those business cases while considering the market and daily use of customers.

Here are some examples of potential solutions.

Future Forward - NPS or Stage revamped.

Future Forward - NPS or Stage revamped cont.

Future Forward - Home, Search, and Discover. Simplifying the app.

Future Forward - Library revamped.

Future Forward - Discover personas.

Validation & Feedback:

• After delivering the concept, moving into development is the concluding process towards QA and shipping out to real customers. Dev teams work closely with design to ensure smooth delivery. This is where Slack was crucial considering the timezones of India and the technical teams. Personally it always a rewarding process that yielded great results for the team and the company.

• Using Reddit is a great way to get the VOC voice of the customer. After a product launches it was always a habit to read the press releases and check Reddit every now a then to collect insights from real users. Its not always for the faint of heart but feedback is not always kind.

• Overall Amazon Music instills a lot about what it takes to run a design team and process, manage expectations, and navigate the design process in an environment where design principles may be overlooked, and to always keep a pulse on the process. It is the key to delivering new industries and ideas to people for a lasting impact.