Senior Product Manager – Technical Intern

I worked as a Senior Product Manager – Technical Intern at Amazon.com, Inc. in Austin, Texas, within the company's fulfillment operations. My work supported mobile device technologies used by frontline associates across North American fulfillment centers. The environment required operating at significant scale, where product decisions needed to account for real-world workflows, operational constraints, and long-term scalability.

My work sat at the intersection of associate experience and operational efficiency, focusing on how device strategy and product decisions directly influenced productivity and fulfillment performance.

I was brought into the role with an intentionally ambiguous problem: analyze how packages actually flow through fulfillment centers, map end-to-end process paths across different site types, identify the mobile devices associates used at each step, and pinpoint opportunities to improve productivity through device or process changes.

The primary goal was to translate this ambiguity into a clear, defensible recommendation. This required understanding how associates experienced and moved through real-world workflows, evaluating how devices supported or constrained those interactions, and synthesizing insights into a proposal that balanced operational impact, cost considerations, and long-term scalability.

A critical part of the goal was securing stakeholder alignment. The final recommendation needed to be clear enough to drive decision-making and compelling enough to earn buy-in across operations, engineering, finance, and supply chain teams.

I started by building a working understanding of how fulfillment operations functioned across different site types. This involved mapping expected process paths and how they aligned with mobile devices in Amazon's catalog, creating an initial view of how packages flowed and where devices played a role in associate workflows.

I then grounded this view in reality through direct observation and customer interaction. I conducted five site visits across different fulfillment center types, following packages end to end and speaking with associates at each station about how devices and workflows supported or hindered their work. I complemented this with 10 associate interviews across North America to validate patterns, surface recurring pain points, and understand which issues were most impactful.

I synthesized these insights by connecting observed pain points to outcomes such as productivity, throughput, ergonomics, and device cost. Throughout the process, I regularly aligned with partners across engineering, operations, finance, and supply chain to ensure recommendations reflected frontline realities while remaining practical within broader organizational constraints.

A key decision was how to make sense of a wide range of fulfillment processes that varied by site type, with some workflows existing only in specific facilities. Rather than evaluating each process independently, I reframed workflows into two categories: stationary and mobile roles. This simplification made it possible to compare device needs across sites without losing important operational nuance.

This framing revealed that mobile roles shared similar device requirements despite differences in process design. Based on this insight, I evaluated whether a single mobile device could better support these roles at scale. The recommendation balanced improvements in associate productivity, package throughput, and ergonomics against device cost and long-term support considerations.

More broadly, the work required balancing local variation with system-wide consistency. The recommendation needed to reflect on-the-ground realities while remaining simple enough to standardize and adopt across Amazon's fulfillment network.

The recommendation demonstrated the potential to drive a 5% improvement in associate productivity within mobile workflows, alongside gains in package throughput. Ergonomic studies conducted on the proposed device showed positive results, reinforcing that productivity improvements could be achieved while supporting associate comfort and safety.

I also delivered a 5-year roadmap that gave stakeholders a clear, scalable device direction to inform long-term planning across operations, engineering, finance, and supply chain.

This experience reinforced how effective product decisions are grounded in real customer workflows while accounting for scale and operational constraints. Operating in a complex environment strengthened how I approach ambiguity, evaluate tradeoffs, and align stakeholders around a clear direction.

It also sharpened my ability to translate insight into decision-ready recommendations, particularly when working across technical systems and diverse teams at scale.