Alexa+

Alexa needed a fundamental redefinition. Not a feature upgrade, a generation shift. What should Alexa be now that LLMs make conversation viable as a primary interaction model? How should it speak? What should it offer? How should the experience feel different from the decade of voice assistants that came before?

The work had to happen at the conceptual layer before any screen design started.

We started with a three-day cross-functional visioning workshop. PMs, engineers, writers, designers, all in one room for three days. By the end we had the foundational experience strategy: what Alexa should be, how it should speak, what it should offer and where the new interaction model would diverge from the old product.

After that, eighteen months of execution. A team of six designers (four UX direct reports plus two visual designers from a sister team) drove end-to-end concepting and refinement. A month-long working session with six more designers from Amazon’s Futures team brought longer-arc speculative thinking into the work.

The vision-definition phase produced an interaction model document, conversational tone guidelines and a service architecture map. They became the reference for every team building toward Alexa+. Weekly executive review for the duration of the project, with six-plus directors and a VP standing audience, drove alignment through multiple rounds of executive sign-off up to and including SVP Panos Panay.

The hardest design problem wasn’t the words or the screens. It was getting hundreds of people across multiple orgs to agree on what they were building and to keep agreeing for eighteen months.

Vision work is leadership work. The deliverable that mattered most wasn’t a Figma file. It was the alignment artifact that let three orgs commit to the same direction in the same week. Senior product design at this scope becomes facilitation more than authorship. Both have to be excellent for the work to ship.

Role. UX Design Manager and contributing designer. Led kick-off, brainstorming and the foundational UX strategy. Hands-on design throughout, deepening as the project moved toward release.

Team. Four UX direct reports plus two visual designers from a sister team (six total). Month-long collaboration with Amazon’s Futures team.

Public. Alexa+ launched in 2025, free to Prime members. Amazon described it as feeling less like interacting with technology and more like engaging with an insightful friend.