Chapter Two: Day One - Joining Amazon

Last week I mentioned that after six year at Microsoft I was leaving the company to pursue a new adventure that would push my growth and skills to new levels. To me, learning can only be done if I constantly push myself outside my comfort zone - I think today’s decision does this.

I am happy to announce that starting today I will be joining Amazon Web Services as a Senior Product Manager, Technical on the Amazon EventBridge team, making serverless and event-driven infrastructure more accessible and developer-friendly.

The web is composed of millions of services and APIs that can amplify their potential by interoperating with each other and connecting disjoint web assets. This is part of the reason why I am so excited about joining the EventBridge team - the work done by them closely resonates with my passion for automation and building cohesive systems out of smaller, distributed pieces.

So why this particular career decision? When exploring potential opportunities, I have established a set of criteria that I knew could help me grow and at the same time allow me to contribute in the best way possible to the success of a product and organization:

• Data-driven approach to decision making. I wanted to join a team where data is the lifeblood of the product - it’s democratized across the team and there are no barriers for anyone to explore the underlying product engagement.
• Proximity to technical details. I wanted to get much closer to the technical side of things - something that I miss from my early days on Coding4Fun.
• Autonomy, trust & freedom to innovate. For me it’s key that in the team I join the members trust each other to execute, experiment, innovate and learn from failures. The higher the iteration velocity, the more likely we are to build a product that delights our customers.
• Scope of impact. I like to think big and then ensure we tackle big, audacious goals - one step at a time.
• Customer-focused. Above all, the team should focus on serving customers first - the product is a solution to their problems and pain points.

To add to the criteria above, in crucial times like these it’s never been more important to build tools and infrastructure that can scale and support those that depend on it the most. AWS has been at the forefront of the effort to support healthcare infrastructure as well as research to help us get through the COVID-19 crisis. I am inspired by the work of many teams that was done to assist those that are helping communities around the globe win the battle against the novel coronavirus. Seeing the massive strides in this space that my good friend Wilson To has been driving at Amazon sealed my decision that AWS is the right place to be. I am firm believer in joining missions rather than specific teams or organizations, and I am confident that being part of the most customer-centric company is key to ensuring that we can make others successful and help unlock solutions to major issues, no matter the challenge.

I am excited to learn, grow, build a better understanding of our customers’ requirements and, above all, make them successful through powerful, scalable and affordable cloud infrastructure and integrations. I will still be based in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia - the Pacific Northwest is our family’s dream location.