Amazon Kindle Devices
October 2021 - December 2025
I joined the Kindle org in late 2021 to take ownership of a team that had been ravaged by attrition and had a reputation for severe churn due to high levels of senior leadership involvement. Additionally, we were in the midst of the most ambitious device project in the history of the Kindle brand. Over the last two years, I’ve worked to stabilize the team, establish a safe environment for creative risk taking, built mechanisms to increase launch speed, and brought the Kindle Scribe to a successful launch in 2022. Following is a brief overview of some of the team’s major initiatives and areas of ownership.
Kindle Shopping Page | Kindle Scribe Product Detail Page | Kindle Scribe Reviews
Stabilize and Get to Launch
Upon taking ownership of the Kindle UX team we had attritted 40% of our team and been through two managers in less than 18 months. Most of this churn was due to issues with overwork and senior management involvement in day-to-day design decisions.
To address these issues, I established new intake and estimation tools to empower the team to create boundaries around new requests and to create a reporting mechanism for team productivity. Additionally, I managed up to rework our multiple VP reviews to help senior leaders maintain visibility into high-consideration design decisions, while minimizing thrash.
Through these tools I was able to stem attrition, rehire the team to full strength and support the ambitious launch of the Kindle Scribe in Q4 of 2022.
Fast Follows and Deliver for Customers
Following our push to hit our launch requirement of Q4 2022, customers responded negatively to tradeoffs that the business approved to hit our deadline. This feedback resulted in a sub 4-Star aggregate review score on Amazon.com, missing our key performance indicator for the device. To accelerate launch of key feature enhancements, our team led the design and launch of several key notebook features.
Following a mixed method UX research program, we identified features to prioritize for the first two quarters of 2023.
The support and launch cadence of these features was not lost on our customers and were called out in E-Reader communities as well as in the tech press. Customers also responded to these “fast-follow” features bringing our Star Review score up from 3.7 to 4.2 be end of Q1 2023.
Build Mechanisms to Reduce Time to Launch
As a learning from our experience building and launching the Kindle Scribe, our team proposed an alteration to the product planning process, bringing software design earlier in the costing process.
Our team secured support and funding to evolve our existing E-Ink component library to a token based design system reducing front end development timelines by 1000s of person hours. To serve other Amazon designers, our team has built training programs and documentation to help teams understand the unique challenges of designing for E-Ink displays.
The engineering org is currently executing a 12 month program migrating our front end frameworks to the tech stack built in collaboration with our team’s recommendations.
Team
UX Design, Research, Writing:
Sam Tobias, Sunny Kim, Emily Deng, Stewart Murrie, Daphne Tan, Jean Kim, Kwabe Fosu, Brian Coella, Zoya Kazi, Rachel Yanoshik
Product Managers:
Jordan Meenan, Joselyn Jiang, John Hu, Yueming Wu
