Alexa Academy pitch
The concept I pitched in 2015 to turn Alexa's developer community into its own content engine. The idea: teach developers to build Skills correctly the first time so the catalog could scale quickly without more staff. The pitch didn't land, but the approach became common practice across developer platforms years later.
Company
Amazon Lab126
Responsibilities
Product Strategist / UX Lead: conceived, pitched, and designed the platform concept
Deliverables
Business case with product strategy; concept with IA, wireframes, and content plan, certification-style checklists, guided "Project Planning 101" path, and curriculum
Impact
- Certification pipeline strategy for a developer learning platform to increase Skills and accelerate their development
Overview
The Echo Skills catalog needed to grow fast, across domains Amazon couldn’t staff internally. My answer was a developer academy: courses, certification-style checklists, and a guided “Project Planning 101” path. The platform would teach developers how to build and publish Alexa Skills correctly the first time, allowing us to quickly scale and expand skills offerings while also supporting the skills creators.
I sketched the information architecture, the wireframes, and an outline for a video learning series. Then I mapped that outline to Amazon’s own leadership tenets (Dig Deep, Insist on the Highest Standards, Customer Obsession, Frugality), so developer education would hold to the same standards the company held itself to.
I developed this concept and pitched it in summer 2015. I brought it to a leader on the team, but like many ideas, it stopped there. I learned two things: I learned to trust my instincts about where platforms were heading, and I learned how to frame an idea like this as a business case. Both have been valuable in every role since.
Amazon later launched its first free Alexa developer training with Big Nerd Ranch, announced in 2016, followed by Codecademy in February 2017, and an AWS certification in 2019. Today, developer education like this is standard across the industry: AWS certifications, Salesforce Trailhead, Google Developer Certification. What I was describing wasn’t a feature request. It was ecosystem strategy, and I saw it early.
Objectives
- Accelerate Skills development to grow the number of available Skills before Echo's release without a proportional increase in Amazon-authored content.
- Develop a reusable content and certification framework to empower developers with a guided path to build Skills correctly the first time
- Create a POC complete with IA and content plan (getting started, development, checklist, certification milestones, publishing) that mapped platform requirements directly to a teachable, tenet-driven curriculum