Kris Bell, UX

A designer who changed the way people shop online

Hello, could you please introduce yourself 🙂

Hello, I’m Kris. I've been designing for about twenty-five years. Today I lead design for Amazon's global navigation on both the shopping website and app. To be more precise, my team and I help customers to discover and find products, programs, and features they need on Amazon.com. We also own an innovation program to create experiences considered to be app unique and app first.

I’m a Senior Principal IC who also manages people, which is an anomaly. Typically, a manager has people to manage and an IC doesn't. But in a lot of ways, the outcomes that are expected of both high-level ICs and managers are pretty similar: you're expected to bring big ideas to the table and drive them through an organization, and then get the resources that are needed to bring those ideas ultimately to market.

I'm at a point in my career where I just want to create great products, so I've chosen to do both, and flex my skills based on projects. Sometimes the easiest path to make great products is for me to take the design work from the point of ideation and concepting all the way through execution, and influence peers to help step in and help out, or to convince a manager to lend some folks to help out.

But at other times, the sheer degree of work that's needed to be done means it's better to take the role of manager, so I can direct people in order to get that work done.

How would you define a Principal Designer?

Principals are those ICs who have grown from a place where they spend most of their days executing on a feature or product to a place where they are thinking much more about design and product strategy. Principals are highly informed decision-makers, influencing their product organization toward bigger outcomes or finding themselves rethinking the fundamentals of the way the company completes their work. Those tend to be the hallmarks, and success is usually a measure of quality and impact as opposed to quantity. To put a finer point on it, sometimes we see Senior Designers who are massively productive and turn out good work over and over and over again. But it's not at a scope or scale that is that large in terms of the entire product or suite of products. By contrast, what we see with Principals is that they're making super-high-quality judgment decisions that are influencing the entire product or product suite. So it's not about the quantity of work as much as it is the quality of their decision making and insights that they bring. I know it can be really frustrating to people who take on more work thinking that doing so is going to help them get to the next level, but then it doesn't. Sometimes that mindset actually works against them because it doesn't give them time to sit back and actually think about what the bigger horizons or the greater ideas are within their product space.

Have you worked on a “principal project” before getting promoted? If yes, mind sharing your story?

Yes, as a lot of companies’ promotion philosophy is that you get promoted to the level of the work you're already doing. I was one of those people who got promoted simply because I outgrew my current position. I just started to do things that were bigger than what was being asked of me and which helped redefine my organization.

There were two things that I did that went into my promotion. One was while I was the senior designer owning Amazon’s checkout flow. At the time, there were four core pages where a customer would be asked for their shipping address, shipping speed, payment method, and to review a final order summary. When I looked at the desktop experience, I thought it was crazy that Amazon offered four different pages to customers when it could all be done dynamically on one. Basically I envisioned a brand new Amazon checkout experience. I drove through a concept that brought all four pages into a single web application that would expand or contract different sections depending on what information was needed. And it ended up being a scalable system that is basically what checkout still is on Amazon today. I could have just been the guy who continued to push along feature-level stuff on each of those pages, but instead I brought forth a vision to our Senior VP for a scalable application for a much better checkout experience, which also enabled 50+ teams within Amazon to build features into it. So that was an example of influencing and having a much bigger impact than my role necessarily called for.

The other thing—I had this project where I had to present to Jeff Bezos four times within four months. The project itself was not principal-level scope. But I successfully navigated those meetings and got company leadership on board with our recommended direction. This example is about having an ability to influence leadership through the design work and rationale that I was bringing to the table. I influenced through storytelling and deeply thought out experiences.

Why are there more people manager roles than principal ICs?

As a newer discipline, I think that historically Principal UX roles just haven’t existed. Rather, a Sr. IC would suddenly find themselves doing highly strategic work or projects that were paradigm shifting for the company. Many managers didn't have a way to promote these people, and ICs led executive-level discussions without the principal title.

I think what has happened is that across a number of different organizations out in the world, this has occurred enough that organizations recognized the need and have begun to codify the Principal Designers as a role that should exist within a company—that it should have actual criteria that one can achieve to get into that role. What I observe is that we're defining the next level up—Principal, Senior Principal, and other executive design ICs. And as a result, they’re now being asked for, not just shuffled along.

What I think will happen with time is that, just as there was a recognition that we needed executive-level design managers—and companies then asked recruiters to find a design director or VP—now we're going to see more of that happening with equivalent level ICs at organizations. We’ll see a balancing in terms of numbers, which is what we've seen at Amazon.

Based on your observations, what trade-offs or risks should designers know about before continuing down the IC path?

I have been both an IC and a Manager in my career. These roles are two different jobs. As I've gone back and forth between the two, there have been times where I've had to weigh the trade-offs between the two pretty heavily. One of the trade-offs that comes to mind is that when you switch to the management path you suddenly are distant from the hands-on work. You are removed from the actual design work being produced, and yet as manager you're still responsible for it. I think that can be a difficult transition for ICs to make if they go into management. That might actually be answering the opposite of this question, but I think it's relevant.

Another trade-off is scope. Staying on the IC path naturally means that your inherent scope can seem limited by the projects that you're assigned or by the scope that your product team has. Managers have so many people beneath them, they naturally have more scope. Principal ICs can have a lot of scope, but when they do, the path looks very different and oftentimes it's much less obvious on how to get there; usually it's about depth and breadth of domain expertise. Being a design director or VP means it's oftentimes simply a function of the number of people that you support, or the number of products that you're responsible for.

Trade-offs to be an individual contributor vs manager

• Hands-on work

• Scope among multiple teams

• Number of job openings

Could you share your framework to be more impactful?

Every job I've had for the past few years, I've written a charter for myself—the charter that's specific to the job that I have. My current charter is threefold:

• Lead creative direction of the most visible projects

• Work closely with cross-functional partners in product and engineering to drive both short and long-term roadmaps for my team and for myself

• Develop the careers of my team’s designers and ensure their happiness grows over time

I revisit the charter pretty regularly to ensure the things that I'm working on fall into one of those three buckets, so I'm not spending a bunch of time on lower-value things that don't ladder to what I'm working on.

Now, the other thing that I have done is written a job description for myself for when I want to find a new job. The job description serves the same purpose as the charter, but it gets down to the granular things that I want to be doing in a role. Take a few excerpts from an old job description I created when envisioning what my next role could be:

• I'm most valuable when I have willing hands with clear authority, meaning that I'm closely aligned with product and tech teams. I'm less effective when I evangelize new ideas all the time. I'd rather find a great idea and then go after it. I know I am at my best when I'm getting super deep into the details and driving a complex idea through to fruition.

• I'm at my best when I'm talking to actual users and when those users are the decision-makers for a product. I feel like I am not at my best when I work on things where it doesn't matter what the users need, and what matters is what the enterprise needs.

• I'm at my best when I have personal knowledge and interest in the work. It means I'm thinking about it, not just for the eight hours that I'm on the clock, but all the time, as a lens into my daily activities, so that insights can happen at any moment.

So I've always used those both to craft the right jobs for myself, and I've also used the job descriptions to go and actually seek the right jobs for myself to ensure my own impact.

How to improve skills for people who want to continue the IC path?

For those who want to continue to move up in their careers, there's this balance that happens between being in meetings and actually sitting down to do design work. Everybody wants to find flow. Everybody wants to look up after eight hours of designing something and feeling like it was an awesome, productive day. But that is going to be a limiting factor. When you spend most of your time on the design work, it means you're not in the meetings when the decisions are being made, where the big ideas are being discussed and bandied about. You're naturally not getting inputs into the work that you could take and do something bigger. You're not getting the perspectives, you're not getting the key pain points and needs that teams are bringing from interactions with customers. So you have to find a balance between being in the right meetings in order to collect those insights and thoughts, and then having that time to actually think and do the craft at your workstation. But you can't err too far on either side because you're either going to find yourself in meetings all day and then have nothing to show for your time. Or you're going to find yourself having sat at your desk all day, but then not being able to produce anything that actually had the right inputs going into it.

How do you provide feedback when switching between exploration and giving direction for teams to execute?

There are times when I need to get hands on and actually help lift the work. There are times when I have to give feedback that is pointed and actionable. And then there are times when I need to offer suggestions or question the choices that have been made, but maybe not try to direct the work. It all depends a lot on my role in a particular project. Am I responsible for the work? Do I have to ensure that it meets a certain level of quality and rigor? If so, I might jump in and actually be hands-on. If I'm just accountable in some way as a reviewer for my broader design team, but not the owner of the project, I might get very direct feedback and say “this is what I think you ought to do,” but I’ll let the owner make the final judgement. And then there are times when I just talk to teams from an area I'm not deeply familiar with and they just want some input quickly. In these cases it's not actually worthwhile for me to try to give feedback when people have deep knowledge and rationale. In this case, by simply questioning what it is that they are trying to do it helps them think through their own judgement and decision-making.

What excites you about being a designer in the next few years?

I like to spend more of my time on the mental models and conceptual frameworks that we use to really define our work. The kinds of conversations I like to have with my design team, design peers, my product partners, are largely exchanging thoughts on “What are the paradigms that we’re working within? How can those paradigms disrupt what is currently in place? How do we move from our current local maximum to the next maximum?” It's part philosophy, business, industry trends, and human nature. I think the intersection of those things continue to be the foundation of the best design that this world has to offer. I want to continue to play in that world and see if I can contribute in some meaningful way to it.