Case Study · Amazon
Making the path to
promotion visible.
Amazon's promotion process was opaque. We built a career development LMS that gave employees, managers, and HR a shared source of truth, for the first time.
Amazon's promotion process was opaque. We built a career development LMS that gave employees, managers, and HR a shared source of truth, for the first time.
The difference between L4 and L5, or L5 and L6, is a real jump in compensation, scope, and career trajectory. But for most employees, the path to promotion was opaque. Managers described expectations differently. Required competencies weren't standardized. Employees didn't know what "ready" actually looked like until they were told they weren't there yet.
Employees had no visibility into what specific competencies they needed to demonstrate to reach the next level.
Managers described promotion criteria inconsistently across teams, creating inequity in the process.
HR had no aggregate view of promotion pipeline health. Calibration sessions were manual and time-consuming.
There was no single platform connecting learning, feedback, assessments, and promotion readiness in one place.
The most critical early insight was that each user type had a fundamentally different relationship with the same data. We designed three distinct experiences on one unified platform.
Four screens spanning employee, manager, and HR experiences, designed across three distinct user flows.
Results measured at 90 days post-launch against pre-launch baseline across Amazon Creative Services.
"The most important conversation I had on this project wasn't about UI. It was convincing stakeholders that employees needed to see their own data before managers did."
Designing for high-stakes decisions requires extra care around information hierarchy. When data directly affects someone's promotion and compensation, every label carries weight. The manager/employee visibility boundary was the hardest UX problem on the project. Getting it wrong would have destroyed trust in the entire system.
Internal Creative Services was a studio, several designers and artists in one group, so I spent a lot of time advocating for decisions in rooms full of PMs and engineers who moved fast. Inside that studio I also ran solo projects, this one included, where the calls were mine from framing through to build. The two modes teach different things. Alignment turns out to be a design artifact in its own right, and you only really learn that in the first mode.