AWS Capabilities: Expansion planning tool

Empathize beyond a creative brief

The initial design challenge focused on addressing a “find out too late” problem. Customers were discovering critical AWS regional feature gaps midway through deployment. Rather than immediately designing a visibility solution, I stepped back to understand the root cause. Through stakeholder conversations and customer interviews spanning enterprise organizations to small businesses, I uncovered that the real issue wasn’t just missing information, it was broken planning confidence. Teams were making strategic infrastructure decisions without clear foresight into feature readiness. I synthesized these insights into personas that captured the operational pressures, risk tolerance, and decision-making constraints of different customer segments, ensuring engineering teams understood not just the problem, but the human impact behind it.

Facilitate strategic ideation

Instead of treating lack of foresight as a simple data surfacing problem, I facilitated ideation sessions that reframed it as a planning and risk management issue. The conversation shifted from “How do we display availability?” to “How do we enable confident expansion planning?” This reframing influenced the tool's direction by centering solutions around proactive decision support rather than reactive discovery.

Work backwards from a vision

I designed a future-state vision prototype that supported both confidence and contingency for customers. The concept provided visibility, validated timelines, and clear alternative paths. Then, I created and executed a research plan that would validate the concept's direction as well as collect insight into priority features. With the results, I structured an iterative delivery plan, prioritizing MVP features that delivered immediate planning value while building toward a more comprehensive capability roadmap. This approach allowed me to influence business priorities while delivering incremental impact aligned with real customer needs.