I led design across four active connected product teams, building the platform standards, engagement models, and governance practices that made a new connected product ecosystem possible at scale.
My work at Amway wasn't limited to a single product. As design lead in the connected products accelerator, I worked across four active product teams, each running in agile cycles with their own roadmaps, engineering constraints, and delivery timelines. Sky, the first connected product launched on a new AWS platform, anchored the work. The broader challenge was building the infrastructure for how design operated across a growing connected product portfolio.
Coordinating across four teams meant managing competing priorities without direct authority over any of them. Each team operated independently but depended on shared services (authentication, data infrastructure, design standards) that I was responsible for defining. Regional market constraints, shifting program definitions, and the need to align leadership, product, and delivery teams that didn't always share the same view of the work added continuous pressure to every sprint cycle.
The accelerator model meant building operating infrastructure alongside the product itself. My design work had to make four teams more effective, not just one. Work ran in sprints with quarterly planning across the portfolio, with Sky as the platform proving ground for patterns that other products would inherit.
Standards & Platform Foundation
I developed an accelerator playbook and design standards to create consistency across connected product experiences. The engagement models I defined clarified how the accelerator group worked with each product team, setting expectations for when and how design participated in sprint cycles.
Governance & Organizational Alignment
I facilitated decision-making between leadership, product, and delivery teams across the portfolio. I created visibility between innovation pipeline initiatives and active delivery teams to surface conflicts between roadmap aspirations and sprint capacity before they became blockers.
Delivery & Quality Practices
I introduced a content development strategy to make sure content arrived with enough context to avoid rework. I led usability testing alignment efforts, educating teams on QA definitions and the process being piloted across the portfolio. I coordinated post-launch planning across product, support, deployment, and security stakeholders.
Market Integration & Discovery
I defined integration approaches for the China launch and future regional markets. I facilitated research and discovery for next-generation capabilities and kept teams moving when program definitions shifted or requirements evolved. I also worked to keep future pipeline products in sync so teams weren't solving the same problems twice.
When one product team pushed for a distinctive mobile menu treatment, I held the shared pattern. Not to limit creativity, but because those underlying UI elements were shared across every app in the portfolio. Deviating would have added development overhead that rippled across every product, not just one. The unique direction wasn't central to the product experience, and protecting cross-portfolio velocity outweighed the differentiation. Making that case and reaching alignment with the team was part of what the accelerator role required.
Sky launched in China in 2017 and went through multiple release cycles, including extensions that connected the digital experience to physical product controls. The more durable outcome was the operating model I built through the accelerator work. Design standards, engagement practices, and governance structures gave subsequent connected product teams something to build from rather than reinvent from scratch.
Sky's launch gave us real-time visibility into how consumers and dealers actually used a connected product in the field, something that hadn't been possible before. The accelerator infrastructure I put in place meant subsequent products could move faster, benefit from shared standards, and coordinate more effectively across teams from the start rather than solving the same problems over again.