Performance and reliability mattered the most-it was the product experience.Īfter hosting a mini‐hackathon we were able to address the critical playback and performance issues. We had been so focussed on the design of the product and at this point it did not matter to customers. This was a sobering moment for the entire team. Playback Quality and PerformanceĬustomers indicated that streaming Prime content took too long to start playback and Prime music would often just stop. The product team divided into smaller teams to investigate the top categories for customer feedback and develop a proposal to address the top risks by launch. Concurrently, I would design the next feature in the pipeline, whilst also working with my own platform engineering teams to execute the current feature through to completion. I followed by working with platform designers to translate product features for their platform’s context. Once each feature was designed and approved, the engineering team began the implementation. I led the design for all aspects related to the store.Įach feature phase of the project was serialised, starting with the design and development for the reference platform-Kindle Fire. Chasing Waterfallsįeature design and development were broken into parallel workstreams for the Music Library and Digital Music Store. This early architectural decision had a major impact on the quality of the customer experience we could both create and reconcile.

Extend the acquire, play, manage conceptual model that customers were familiar with and leverage the existing infrastructure to get to market sooner and cheaper. The assumption was simple-millions of customers visit Amazon everyday. This tactic was perceived to be advantageous and the least riskiest. In favor of speed to market, we were tasked to design and build Prime Music within the existing Digital Music Store and Music Library architecture.

Amazon digital music store