LEAH MELVOIN
I am a 23 year Amazon veteran, most known for my management of the company's Voice of the Developer initiative. As the program owner I was an advocate for the Amazon global STEM population. I researched their concerns, articulated the issues impacting them, and either personally resolved or influenced the resolution of hundreds of problems impacting engineers and their management. I drove company investments in better computer equipment, developer tools, engineer training, operational excellence, and tech role-specific career development mechanisms.
One of my most notable accomplishments was the creation and management of the Amazon Tech Survey. I used the "working backward" approach to design the survey questions, asking engineers to let me know what they wanted senior leadership to know (vs. a top-down survey which only asks what the leaders want to know). I also made sure results were transparent to all employees to encourage them to take ownership and drive resolution to local problems. The result of my approach yielded a 95+% participant response to a voluntary survey for over a decade, setting the gold standard for employee engagement within the company.
In my last few years at Amazon, I joined the Global Talent Management organization. Working with HR and Compensation, I created the company-wide Amazon Job Level Guideline (applies to all employees, individual contributor and management tech and non-tech), simplified the Amazon Tech Promotions process, and wrote most of the company's Tech role guidelines. I also developed several trainings to help calibrate level expectations and support all types of engineers working to achieve the Principal level. I was also a founding member of Amazon Women in Engineering and part of the global senior leadership team that influenced company changes to their parental leave policy and other benefits.
In 2020, I decided to go out on my own and offer my expertise as a consultant. Since that time I've worked with the following excellent companies (any of which I recommend due to the high quality of their leadership): Amazon, CommerceIQ, Convoy, Datadog, Discovery, Elemy, Fabric Inc., Flexe, KKR, Meituan, Peloton, Pepsi, Roku, Snapchat, Uplevel, and Varsity Tutors.
For more detail on my Amazon work experience, see my LinkedIn profile.