Designing continuous music experiences for Alexa

Music was one of Alexa's most widely used capabilities, but usage was often narrower than the product's possibilities. Customers did not always know what they could ask, how to discover new functionality, or how to continue listening as their location, device, or account context changed.

I worked across a progression of Alexa Music initiatives: first building a high-velocity experimentation practice, then translating those learnings into a longer-term product vision, and finally designing experiences that made music more personal and continuous across shared and connected devices.

The experimentation program was created to explore customer problems through smaller, faster product changes rather than relying only on large annual releases. I supported the work end to end: combining customer evidence, defining experience problems, designing voice and visual interactions, partnering through implementation, and evaluating what should be expanded, revised, or discontinued.

Individual experiments answered narrow questions, but together they revealed a broader opportunity: music could feel more continuous and context-aware without becoming intrusive. I organized and co-facilitated a five-day cross-functional vision sprint to explore that opportunity, align multiple Alexa teams, create testable concepts, and gather customer feedback. My role spanned framing, participant alignment, leadership review, co-facilitation, research partnership, scenario writing, and socializing the direction across the organization.

Many of the most ambitious Alexa Music concepts did not begin with a screen. Guest Connect depended on Alexa recognizing and applying the right identity on a shared device. Media-portability concepts involved music continuing or moving as a customer changed rooms or devices. Future-of-music explorations focused on contextual behavior rather than a conventional graphical interface. That made the work difficult to communicate through static wireframes alone.

Guest Connect in particular required two cross-functional product areas to agree on an experience involving identity, permissions, shared devices, and personal content. The written proposal contained the answers, but the experience remained too abstract to reconstruct mentally. Leadership review surfaced repeated questions the document technically addressed.

I proposed making the experience visible as a short scenario video. I wrote the script, coordinated teammates as participants, arranged access to a simulated home environment, filmed the end-to-end experience, and edited the final narrative. In the next review, leaders could understand the experience as a whole. It created the alignment the written document had not achieved and helped the project move forward.

The video was not marketing added after the design. It was a functional design artifact used to validate the end-to-end model and enable a product decision.

A listening experience can span several devices and rooms. Customers needed to understand what was playing, choose an appropriate destination, and move or extend playback without reconstructing the session. I led experience design for short- and medium-term media-portability concepts across voice and multimodal surfaces, defining the information architecture, interaction flows, visual patterns, edge states, and the relationship between active streams and available devices.

Voice and touch were not parallel versions of the same interface. Each modality handled a different part of the decision.

This work taught me to design across distributed systems where identity, context, modality, and platform boundaries shape the customer experience. I later carried those lessons into enterprise AI — first by designing Workday inside Microsoft Copilot, and then by founding the product design for Workday Agent System of Record.

In a live walkthrough, I can discuss additional iteration and collaboration detail while preserving confidential Amazon product information.