managed development of the Kindle e-ink ad platform (black & white, o

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ine ad experience), a much di

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erent skill set than was needed for the new android-based Fire tablets.

I was brought in only a few months prior to launch, which at the time was scheduled for July of that year. I was on several calls with advertisers where they expressed disappointment and unhappiness with our planned ad product - a very static experience - kind of like an e-ink ad experience but with color. W e were losing advertisers and having trouble getting many to commit to the launch (major launch partners paid $1.2MM each to be part of the launch).

We needed much more interactive, engaging experiences and I believed Amazon could and should launch the best tablet ad platform globally - there was no excuse not to. So I pushed for and brought in an award- winning third party mobile development team that had signiﬁcant experience building ad products for eBay and Google among others, to build out our initial ad experiences. My manager did not communicate to her management chain the p ositive impact I was having on the product - in fact, she once told me “Y ou’re here to make me look good - you’re doing an awesome job”.

Regardless, with the help of the new outside mobile development team, we began changing the pitch to advertisers, increasing the capabilities of the product, and ultimately had a successful launch. According to the VP at launch, the Kindle Fire platform was ‘the best performing ad platform in the company’.

A few weeks prior to launch, I was forced to escalate a key technical issue to the VP and SVP around latency - it was taking at least 3-5 seconds for our advertising app to load our advertiser’s custom landing pages - this is a problem the Kindle Ad Products team owned - ultimately an issue owned my manager Munira Rahemtulla and VP Paul Kotas. This latency was unacceptable to me but ‘within acceptable norms’ according to the technical team that reported into my manger, and also my manager. They just didn’t think it was an issue, and despite weeks of well-documented attempts to get them to address the issue, it wasn’t addressed. About a month prior to launch (before the launch was subsequ ently pushed to early September), in our monthly review meeting with Je

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Blackburn where he saw the devices for the ﬁrst time, and also saw the latency. He told our team (from a transcript of the meeting):

“I think it is a huge problem. It could ruin the whole launch if we don’t ﬁx it. I’m concerned that you don’t think this is the top priority. I think that Je

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[Bezos] could say ‘get it [the Kindle Fire Ad Platform] o

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device’….I’m telling you this could remove the whole program…..I think the initial launch is really important…And the initial page is really important…This shou ld be highly optimized…Should put tons of ener gy on that.”

He was right and I was relieved he brought it up - we could now get the dev team to ﬁx it. I did not mention in that meeting with Je

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that I had been trying for weeks to get my manager and her development team to address the issue. I kept that to myself.

Later and to my surprise, in a response to a note from me to address the latency issue, I was told by the TPM that reports to Munira, that it essentially was too late to ﬁx the issue - that we would need to address it in a software update after launch. They had heard Je

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Blackburn’s feedback, yet seemed to disregard it.

THE ESCALATION

I wondered if they had been in the same meeting with Blackburn that I was in - it was unbelievable to me that they were punting on ﬁxing the issue. My manager was cc’d on my emails to them and also was unsuccessful at getting the issue addressed by her own team though they reported into her. It was now the weekend and with at the time less than 30 days to launch, I felt it necessary to escalate the issue - I sent a note that weekend to Je

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Blackburn (SVP) and Paul Kotas (VP) cc’ing my manager, basically asking for the contact information for the person that managed latency for amazon.com, because we needed someone that ‘cares about every last millisecond to sit with our team’ and help us get the issue addressed prior to launch. I still did not say that I had been trying to get our team to address the latency issue for weeks to no avail and that Munira provided no support in that regard, and I again kept that to myself.

THE RETALIATION & HARASSMENT

Soon after my email, my manager sent me an email stating she was ‘embarrassed’ by my note. I suppose if I were her I would have been embarrassed too - the latency issue should have been addressed well prior to