In nearly 10 years spent at Amazon I can surely say that I have accomplished and delivered a lot, often despite ambiguity, conflicting priorities and lack of resources.
Distilling a short, compelling summary isn’t easy – but here are some of my proudest moments (in descending chronological order);
- Mid-2022, I transferred from Amazon Shipping – part of the wider Amazon Consumer business – to Amazon Web Services. AWS is its own beast. A massive organization that relentlessly innovates, grows and morphs – just like the rest of Amazon, you would say. Wrong. I don’t know if you can call a multi-billion-dollar business a startup, but AWS certainly does feel like one. And it’s awesome. I joined AWS to build a new function within the global Customer Optimization & Enablement team from the ground up; Business Management. We are the engine behind the team; we build mechanisms and frameworks, we empower our 100+ CO&E Specialists to deliver on behalf of our customers, we build analytics and help the leadership with data-driven decision-making. I am incredibly proud of where my team and I have gotten so far; 10+ individuals, 2 different verticals, and countless deliverables nailed in a very short time frame. In the first 6 months, I had the chance to measure myself not just with hiring and developing the best talent, but with the challenge of forming and deploying a vision for a team that never existed before, in a brand new organization working on a product I didn’t yet understand. Interlocking my strategy with that of my peers and external stakeholders proved to be a very exciting and rewarding exercise – full of brainstorming sessions, think-big discussions and knowledge sharing moments. We are now entering 2023 with brand new KPIs, goals, analysis and mechanisms will help us supercharge the effectiveness of our organization
- Throughout 2021, I led a team of tenured Program Managers and owned Customer Experience and Customer Support within Amazon Shipping. At the same time, I was tasked to launch the first ever Business Analyst team within the organization. It was an incredibly intense experience that stretched me well beyond my comfort zone; as much as data and analytics was my bread and butter, learning how call centers work and how to action CSAT was a steep learning curve. In the 12 months with the team, I crystalized and deployed the vision of a much more versatile and dynamic support model and by the time I left, customer support cases were being automatically routed to the teams best equipped to resolve them at first touch. By far the most complex and multi-dimensional project I led, but the most rewarding too. Customers loved it. CSAT soared.
- Who has not purchased something small from Amazon and yet received a massive box full of empty space? Well, that, is a massive problem for any transportation and logistics company. At Amazon, box dimensions are decided by fancy and complicated AI algorithms that measure the items in an order and can predict what package size is the most optimal. Sometimes though, things don’t quite go as expected. In 2020 I was a Senior Finance Analyst within the UK Transportation team and I drove the resolution a multi-million dollar problem that consistently caused small and light items to be shipped in large and bulky boxes. Owning the problem from the initial deep dive and modelling phase, all through coordinating with several product and tech teams to execute the solution was challenging yet very rewarding. It was then that I decided I needed a shift in my career, and a few months later I became a Senior Program Manager.