AMAZON WORKPLACE
BACKGROUND
Amazon is a global organization with a corporate workforce of nearly 500,000 employees. When COVID hit, its impact on work life was as undeniable as its impact on the personal lives of people. Everybody was forced indoors. Social distancing became the norm as did work from home. After the initial shock settled of the pandemic settled and COVID became a part of our lives, places started to open up, but at limited capacity. That reality became the birthplace of Amazon Workplace (AWP) - a platform that allowed corporate employees across Amazon, now without a dedicated workspace in their office, to reserve a seat for themselves for the days they planned to go to work from office. It was a way for them to ensure that in a building that was now operating at a limited capacity while maintaining social distancing, they will have a seat to sit and work on when they go to office. This new product, while exciting, was designed and developed in haste, with seat reservation being its sole purpose.
Illustrated below is the Amazon Workplace when it was first launched.
THE CHALLENGE
As the seat reservation feature picked momentum amongst corporate employees senior leadership started having discussion around how the roadmap of Amazon Workplace should evolve. It was after all a standalone product in its own might that had the potential to be so much more than just a calendar indicating days an employee has a seat reserved for them in office. This was also the time I was onboarded on the team as the product design lead for Amazon Workplace.
PARTNERSHIPS
The evolution of Amazon Workplace was a result of a collaborative and transparent partnership with
Product manager
Technical program manager
Front end engineering team
Back end engineering team
PROJECTS
Listed below are the case studies of some of the major projects and proposals worked on as part of the Amazon workplace evolution.
Work from Office
A step up to the existing seat reservation feature allowing employees to use AWP as a way to come to office to with the purpose of face-to-face collaboration with their colleagues.
Landing page
A fresh take on AWP that allows employees to be more proactive when planning what their work from office days looked like. Think collaborating with other teammates in office, in person office events, popular WFO days etc.
Seat assignment - POC
A proof of concept that showcases how AWP capabilities can be expanded to include a seat assignment feature that makes it easier for managers to assign seats to their team, skipping traditional loops for seat assignment.
UPDATION IN PROGRESS
SUCCESS
Amazon Workplace, since its inception has had a roadmap prone to a lot of changes driven by how the pandemic has changed modern workforce. As a result, the AWP roadmap is constantly evolving based on user feedback and response to how the employees want to work from office and work in general post pandemic. This journey has involved a lot of mid project direction changes, strategic changes to the roadmap, stopping a project while it’s mid design to pick up other higher priority projects and working on a strict timeline where the launch date was finalized before the design and engineering estimates were set. It involved multiple sessions involving product, design and engineering trying to map out what an MVP would look like to how it would evolve. In a lot of instances, that growth involved working with blurry, sometimes non-existent requirements where all that was communicated in terms of design requirements was “we want the users to be able to do this”.
While AWP continues to grow, it has come quite far from being a single feature platform with less than 10% adoption to a full fledged multi feature product with over 70% adoption in the 4 years it has been around. The user feedback on launched features and features in pipeline that have undergone usability testing has been quite positive as they continue to address user’s pain points around post pandemic in-office work.
LEARNINGS
Growth is not possible without learnings and in my time leading Amazon Workplace I have learned that no matter the scale of the organization, ambiguity can exist anywhere. As a designer I have learned how to navigate my way to success through that ambiguity and to get comfortable with it. I have learned how to be flexible and to always be customer obsessed even if that means changing the design direction midway or even dropping a project I put all my heart into because the user doesn’t want that anymore. I have learned how to operate with efficiency in strict timelines where I always had to be on my toes because there was no scope for error. All these learnings only further reinforce the need to dive deep and know your user inside and out so that success can be achieved despite all the constraints.