Transforming a Struggling Design Org into a $700M Success
Executive summary
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When an under-performing team was restructured under my leadership, I changed their work culture and methods and collaborated with VPs, product teams, and engineering orgs to launch a new enterprise ad suite 2 months ahead of schedule, generating an estimated $700M+ in estimated annualized revenue.
This required re-architecting and upskilling a struggling brand design organization within Amazon Ads; transforming the team's operational focus from tactical, incremental asset production to high-margin, scalable ad products, culminating in the accelerated launch of the Brand Collections suite.
The challenge
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In late 2024, the brand design organization was underperforming, with Sponsored Products outperforming Sponsored Brands by an 8:1 margin. The highest-priority executive mandate for 2025 was to reverse this trend and integrate Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Products into a single full-funnel ad suite, profitable with a target +$1B in 12 months.
The existing team structure was blocked by a legacy focus on custom creative content curation and incremental UX improvements that failed to deliver meaningful ROI for advertisers. After 2 design directors had failed to get the brands team revenue-positive, the design team was merged into mine, with instructions to “fix them” and “change everything”.
Strategic action and leadership
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Re-engineered Team Architecture:
I took immediate ownership of the struggling organization, entirely shifting the team's charter away from manual content creation toward systemic, algorithmic brand exposure.
Enabled Paradigm-Shifting UX Innovation:
I jumped into product suite leadership with a new brand product and leadership team to design a smart visibility engine driving more impressions for brands. Instead of showing static products across all ad placements, the cross-functional team built a dynamic system that changes displayed brand products across pages to match the real-time shopper journey, drastically increasing advertiser impressions, ROI, and satisfaction. While Amazon could not yet offer brands an all-in-one multi-platform package, we could now offer a multi-page one. It was a start.
Drove Employee Velocity:
I instilled a high-velocity product culture that enabled the team to conceptualize, design, and validate this new brand product suite under highly compressed timelines. The original brand team worked as a series of lead designers and low-level support who completed the lead’s specifications. I upskilled the support and gave them independent projects with supervision. Watching their skills grow and confidence thrive was the highlight of my year.
Business impact
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Together with the new product and brand engineering teams, my team successfully designed and launched the Brand Collections product suite, capturing +$700M in estimated annualized revenue during live market testing. We also beat the organization's 12-month launch goal, deploying the suite to production in 10 months for a flagship reveal at Amazon's UnBoxed conference.