Transformed a fragmented workflow into a streamlined platform, reducing service region migration time

Upon joining Amazon's Region Flexibility team, I discovered a patchwork of experiences created without a uniform design language. I created and restructured key workflows using Cloudscape to create a standardized framework for future features and scalability. All in support of our goal of reducing internal Amazon service migrations by 50% in 12 months.

ROLE:

Senior UX Designer

Duration:

7 months

PROJECT:

Region Flexibility

Employer:

Amazon

This case study is under development. Enjoy the preview images.

If you build it, they will come

Managing thousands of internal services, each supporting numerous key experiences and built on decades of code, makes region migration a complex task.

Amazon regularly creates new regions to optimize compute costs and bolster system resiliency. This ongoing effort is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of maintaining the company's vast infrastructure. This strategic expansion not only supports the company's growth but also enhances the overall user experience by providing faster and more reliable service delivery.

The Region Flexibility team was created to accelerate that work by addressing critical gaps in the region migration experience for internal services and create a unified platform to where migrations could be managed both individually and also in relation to key experiences across Amazon.

Below is a small sample of work that prior to a more formal case study being developed.

I redesigned the region migration workflow to better leverage Cloudscape and incorporate the growing number of automation workflows to be included.

Within the process workflow, individual lessons required service engineers to undertake secondary workflows to define various datasets with data recipes.

At multiple junctures, a resource forecast plan can change throughout the year based on key Amazon events. Since migration can kickoff at any point, I concepted a post-plan creation workflow for services to view and manage (if necessary) their forecast plan. This work led to a team pivoting their own roadmap to commit to defining and meeting this product goal.

Moving on up

One of our key metrics was to reduce the estimated average region migration time from 8 weeks to 4 weeks (50% improvement). During my time, we didn't have a demonstrable way to show this as new changes to workflows were implemented a month prior to my contract ending, while use of the product was scaling slowly.

Accomplishments

Redesigned the region migration workflow and information architecture to provide visual consistency across content, UI and experience
Partnered with 10 feature teams providing UX strategy for improving net new migration automations and features
Delivered a new vision that helped a resolute team change their 3 year strategy to partner with RF team.
Created content principles and usage guide for the Region Flexibility platform focused on standardizing the way we communicate across key UI elements. Developed an AI prompt that engineers could use to assess the language and align to principles.

“Josh's delivery of this experience was instrumental in fostering collaboration between RFE and a sister team, which was historically a very strained relationship. His design was so clear that the team is now indicating they are pivoting their3-year vision to align more closely with our desired RFP experience.”
– Product Manager