Restoring accountability and reducing operational friction across large-scale enterprise projects
Impact at a Glance
• Reduced project ownership transfer time from 3–4 days to under 30 minutes
• Enabled self-service ownership management across 13,000+ active projects
• Reduced duplicate project creation by ~15%
• Improved accountability and data reliability across teams
Context
SHIELD is Amazon’s internal real estate and construction platform used by thousands of stakeholders to track projects, sites, milestones, and approvals across regions and business units.
As SHIELD scaled, project ownership became a critical point of failure—impacting timelines, data quality, and team accountability.
Problem
Project ownership was unclear, difficult to change, and inconsistently tracked.
Ownership transfers required technical team involvement, lacked a clear audit trail, and often resulted in stalled projects, duplicate entries, and outdated points of contact. Teams spent significant time trying to determine who owned what, instead of moving work forward.
Goals
The goal was to restore clarity, accountability, and trust in project ownership.
From a business perspective, this meant reducing delays, eliminating duplicate projects, and improving data reliability.
From a UX perspective, success meant making ownership instantly visible, enabling fast and safe transfers, and supporting governance without increasing complexity.
Role
I owned the UX solution end-to-end for the Project Owner initiative.
I partnered closely with the product owner and business analyst to translate complex ownership requirements into a simplified interaction model. I led interaction design, usability testing, and iteration, and drove alignment on tradeoffs between flexibility and governance.
Key Insight
Ownership wasn’t just metadata—it was infrastructure.
When ownership was unclear or hard to change, teams lost time, trust, and momentum. Designing for clarity and auditability mattered as much as speed.
Strategy
The experience strategy focused on making ownership:
• Obvious - visible at a glance
• Transferable - easy to update without technical support
• Traceable - supported by a clear audit trail
Rather than modeling every edge case, the design prioritized the most common real-world scenarios while preserving safety and accountability.
Solution
The Project Owner solution introduced:
• Clear ownership visibility directly at the project level
• A single, guided workflow for transferring ownership
• Permission-based controls to prevent errors
• Automatic audit logging for accountability and transparency
This replaced a multi-screen, tech-dependent process with a self-service experience teams could trust.
Validation
I conducted usability testing with 5–7 users representing different roles.
Testing focused on real ownership transfer scenarios, edge cases, and error prevention. Iterations reduced transfer steps from a multi-screen process to a single, guided workflow.
Outcomes
The Project Owner solution reduced ownership transfer time from days to minutes, eliminated routine technical-team involvement, and significantly improved accountability across active projects.
Most importantly, it addressed the root causes of project delays and duplicate entries by making ownership clear, current, and easy to manage.
Reflection
This project reinforced that governance UX is ultimately about trust, not control.
By designing for clarity and accountability first, we enabled teams to move faster with confidence instead of creating more process.