Amazon Hub

Amazon 2022

Amazon Hub is part of the Last Mile organization and exists to provide a safe and secure alternative to home delivery and returns, also known as Pickup. It results from a connected, complex ecosystem of delivery drivers, associates, and business partners such as CVS, property managers, and package locker technicians. Every participant in the ecosystem depends on physical and digital interactions through unique software, physical products, and workflows that promise on-time and secure package pick-up and frictionless returns for the retail Amazon customer.

The challenge: Build an experience design team and practice that starts with understanding the customer and needs of critical participants, collaborating to deliver Hub experiences, and innovating for the future.

I approached this challenge with a framework or ingredients that I believe are essential for any successful design team or organization. These ingredients are People, Practice, and Process.

People

When I took over as the design leader for Amazon Hub, work to deliver experiences across the ecosystem was already in motion. Before my hiring, there was an organizational shift, leaving the team with only one designer but will a roadmap of work for ten designers. We had to move quickly to plug holes, prioritize and augment our staff and fill the recruiting pipeline.

As I started to learn more about the digital and physical design needs for Amazon Hub, I knew service design and design program management were key disciplines needed along with core product design. Luckily, I inherited backfill roles and worked with my recruiting team to build a pipeline while also reaching out to my network.

The goal was to build an embedded model where designers would partner closely with product teams throughout the product development lifecycle—from problem identification through design, implementation, and launch. Expand the role of design as a driver and facilitator of innovation and strategy, providing a sustainable source of fuel for innovation. We intend to answer the question, “what is the right experience for this feature/technology/product?” and “what is the right feature/technology/product for the experience we are looking to create?”

I believe in building diverse teams with broad skills. When looking for the right hires at the proper levels, I knew they needed to have core design skills while also having the ability to influence a broader experience design transformation within the organization. In 2022 I reviewed over 200 potential candidates’ resumes and portfolios, conducted 60 phone screens, interviewed 25 candidates, and hired 6. It was a good start. To indeed have an effective embedded model, more hiring is to occur in 2023.

Practice

The goal was to build a human center design practice that identifies the key customers or users and puts their needs and outcomes at the center, thus aligning teams around that outcome. It is a Practice that starts with understanding our customers, explores potential solutions and north star experiences, and builds in collaboration with other disciplines. We utilized a core Last Mile Experience Design mechanism called Durable Customer Outcomes.

We discovered that besides the Amazon Retail Customer, we needed to consider four other vital customers/users and design specific outcomes. These are Delivery Drivers; Associates who work in Hub locations; technicians who install and service locations; and the partners such as CVS and Kohls who have Hub locations in and around their business.

During 2022 we leveraged the design research and service design methods to understand the key participants in the Hub ecosystem, map their journeys, identify the Durable Customer Outcomes, and externalize this knowledge with Service Blueprints and other artifacts make the experience tangible for the team and partners.

Through our qualitative and quantitative research, we discovered that Retail Customers receive unique value from the Amazon Hub experience. We created convenience and necessity archetypes to further our shared knowledge and understanding of the customer.

A critical phase of our practice was creation and exploration. With our insight and knowledge gained from the key participants and users in the Hub ecosystem, we partnered with product and tech teams to influence product delivery and integrated Horizon Sprints to envision the future and innovate.

Process

A solid process for human-centered design is essential to operationalize the practice and empower the people with the talent to deliver. With Amazon Hub, we build an Agile for Design process. To support agile for design and product development lifecycles, embedded designers run a dedicated UX sprint and backlog in parallel to engineering sprints. This creates alignment on prioritization for the work and establishes a cadence for the broader team or partners and collaborators to contribute with questions, suggestions, and feedback before the design is finalized and prepped for handoff.

Within this process is reserved two weeks or one sprint every quarter to envision the future. We call these Horizon Sprints. Horizon sprints are about working backward to propose options and experiments to continuously feed the next planning cycle for concepts that may be a higher risk or require cross-business coordination or technical exploration. The horizon mechanism unlocks the unique power of design: to explore options relatively quickly and frugally to evaluate future plans' value, risk, and effort. Horizon Sprints provide customer learning and inform and accelerates innovation while reducing churn.

Existing Amazon Hub customer interaction points.

Delivery ride-a-long images and artifacts depicting the effort to understand the end to end experience, key participants, and customer archetypes.

Horizon Sprint images and artifacts