Product designer life at AWS

It depends on the team and manager, but overall I would say AWS is not a design mature org. It can be challenging to get support for user friendly (never mind visually appealing) designs when you’re vastly outnumbered by engineering and PMs. Also, I’m not sure if it’s just me but I’ve been pretty confused as to what a PMs role is at AWS. That being said it does seem like leadership is realizing that the services need to be more usable and there should be more of an effort placed on UX vs just shipping things that devs designed and built quickly.

Amazon, prime video, Alexa are all the worst designed tech products in faaang, I don’t think they care too much about design so much as having as few steps as possible to do things

AWS is so focused on launching new products and services (those promos aren’t going to happen themselves) they give two shits about design systems and usability. Plus their users are devs and devops - intuitive products isn’t what they’re going for. Hell, information architecture and documentation isn’t what they’re going for.

I would echo the person who said design is not very mature in AWS. There are pockets of course, so look for larger concentrated design teams if you want a hope of working with specialized design roles like visual design, ux writing, or design technology. If you don’t mind doing design evangelism it can be okay; hope you really like doing interaction design.

Depends massively on the service, your manager and the PMs you work with. Despite design team org(s), it can feel like you’re on your own, which can be both lonely and also empowering as you don’t have a load of design org hierarchy pushing their own design decision preference. In terms of design craft, there’s a risk of getting lazy as the bar is pretty low for UX when it comes to implementation. I’d also agree about the maturity of design as a function in AWS - there’s good opportunity to push ideas and better ways of doing things but it’s slow going and you have to really enjoy the subject matter to persevere with it, which is a challenge in itself as the functionality can take months to even understand overall. I think it tends to attract designers who are interested in system thinking - it’s a bit bleak in terms of style/aesthetics and the design framework is very basic, and it feels like everyone is still trying to work out how to use a design framework. It can be rewarding, you’ll ship a lot of stuff and it will be satisfying if you manage to make sense of it and contribute some thinking to help make things easier to use for customers, but .. it’s a heavily technical space and can quickly get quite boring if you’re not into purely functional product thinking. Things are improving, feels like there’s efforts invest in the design framework and educate PM on how to work with design, and many of the managers seem genuinely good and optimistic, which helps as it feels like an uphill struggle to have a satisfying experience as a designer in that space.

One of the challenges I’ve seen with environments that are heavily focused on shipping (start ups, Amazon, etc.) is that you’re typically moving so fast to ship with little regard for product development/design best practices. As a result you’re constantly patching, fixing and (maybe) optimizing post launch if a product has traction. In the meantime, the employee has learned short cuts and bad habits. It’s basically on the employee to reflect and seek out self improvement in their craft otherwise they will become obsolete and struggle to move up in their career.

Not demanding. Demoralizing is more like it. But you’ll get paid more