Technical Program Manager

I led the end-to-end program to launch an advertising tier on Prime Video — a change to the default viewing experience for 260M+ Prime members worldwide, paired with a new paid ad-free option for anyone who wanted to stay ad-free. This wasn't a feature release. It was a change to the core value proposition of one of Amazon's largest subscription businesses — on a fixed, public date, with zero room to degrade the experience for our 120M+ monthly viewers.

I owned the commercial and technical architecture behind the upgrade path, the rollout sequencing across every viewing platform, and the quality guardrails that governed each stage of the launch — and I ran the cross-functional program across Engineering, Legal, Privacy, Marketing, and Customer Service through a ~14-week delivery window.

The result: we launched on the committed date, reached full global availability within 8 weeks, held 99.99% availability with no degradation in viewing quality, kept advertising levels meaningfully below industry norms, and drove $1.8 billion to $3 billion in incremental ad revenue. What could have been the most disruptive change we'd ever made to a 260M-member product instead became one of the smoothest large-scale launches the organization had run — and the operating model I built — the risk-sequenced rollout, the automated guardrails, the single executive dashboard — became the standing governance framework I ran every subsequent large, cross-organizational program through, not a one-off playbook for this launch alone.

1. Every major streaming competitor had already launched an ad-supported tier and was monetizing engagement Prime Video wasn't capturing, while our business ran on subscription revenue alone. Leadership set a mandate to close that gap.

2. The mandate wasn't an opt-in experiment — it was a change to the default experience for 260M+ existing members, with a paid upgrade offered to anyone who wanted to stay ad-free.

3. That made it fundamentally different from a normal launch: a defect or a mishandled rollout wouldn't read as a bug, it would read as a broken promise to paying customers. The technical execution and the trust risk were the same problem, not two separate ones.

4. A public launch date was already set before the technical scope was finalized, and the change had to land consistently across every device our members used — none of which had ever carried advertising in this product before.

1. Before any engineering work was scoped, I wrote the program charter and business case myself — scope, success metrics, the executive sponsors who'd own each trade-off decision — so the mandate to launch didn't outrun a documented plan for how.

2. My task was to own delivery of the tier end-to-end: the account and billing changes needed for the ad-free upgrade, the rollout architecture across every viewing platform, and the guardrails that would decide whether each market was ready to expand.

3. I had to bring every platform team to one fixed launch date — without slipping it, and without degrading the experience for our full monthly audience, not just the newly ad-supported segment.

4. Beyond the build, I owned representing the real state of readiness to Legal, Marketing, and Customer Service — none of whom reported to me — so what we told the public matched what we could actually deliver on day one, not an optimistic estimate.

5. My targets: launch on the committed date, hold quality flat against baseline, and have the ad-free upgrade live and self-serve before a single member saw an ad.

1. Launched on the committed date in the first markets, and reached full global availability within 8 weeks — inside the original plan, with no slip.

2. Held 99.99% availability through launch, including a first-week traffic peak, with no measurable degradation in viewing quality on any platform.

3. Kept advertising levels meaningfully below linear TV and most ad-supported streaming competitors — a specific, defensible answer whenever the question of member impact came up, not a reassurance.

4. The ad-free upgrade was live and self-serve before the first ad ever served, and a high single-digit percentage of eligible members upgraded within 90 days — meaningful scale against a 260M+ member base, with zero billing or entitlement errors.

5. The staged-rollout and guardrail model became the standard playbook for two subsequent pricing and tier changes.

What made this a program-management challenge rather than a pure engineering one was that every technical decision doubled as a trust decision. How much advertising was too much, whether to front-load inventory for revenue, how loudly to tell 260M members about a change they hadn't asked for — none of those had a clean engineering answer. They were judgment calls about where to protect long-term trust over short-term metrics.

The principle I carry forward: build the guardrails before you build the growth, and treat the size of a change as a reason to over-communicate, not minimize it. That discipline is what let a change 260M+ members never asked for land as one of our smoothest launches, instead of a trust incident.