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Fire TV Channels

Amazon · 2021–2023 · Product direction and launch

A free, ad-supported streaming app on Fire TV.

Fire TV ChannelsFire TV screen · 1080p · 1920×1080 · pending

The problem

Fire TV customers wanted something to watch without another subscription, but Amazon's streaming device and smart-TV platform had no free viewing experience of its own. Free, ad-supported video was a growing category, and customers encountered it across the interface through separate apps that also ran on other platforms.

I inherited an initiative to improve movie and TV trailers. I proposed Fire TV Channels: a free, ad-supported streaming service built into Fire TV, with short-form and live content from many providers. Customers could watch news, sports highlights, cooking and more, and Amazon could sell video advertising against viewing inside an experience Fire TV owned.

What I owned

I was the lead product manager on Fire TV Channels from concept through the releases before I left Amazon in June 2023. I led the cross-functional team, defined the roadmap and negotiated resourcing with Amazon Devices senior leadership and partner teams. I brought product, engineering and design together to define the feature set, then co-wrote the requirements document with engineering.

I moved engineering to an eight-week release cycle and introduced bug triage, backlog reviews, biweekly demos and risk reviews. I sent leadership and partner teams short biweekly updates on progress, learnings and problems. With Amazon's user research team, I used surveys, prototype and beta sessions, performance data and customer feedback to reprioritize.

I also worked on how customers would find the service and return to it. I learned how the home screen's promotion system worked, found that it disadvantaged new content categories, and made the case for more promotional impressions. I led the work to pin our content rows so customers could find them again, then identified a smaller change to the pinning process that preserved the behavior without recurring engineering work from another team. Another Fire TV team adopted that change.

The decisions that mattered

Ship early to learn

I pushed for a narrower first release so we could learn which content to show, how the rows should appear and which metrics defined success.

In the fall of 2022, we released free rows of sports highlights, trailers and lifestyle programming on the Fire TV home tab, where customers picked what to watch.

Rank the roadmap explicitly

We had more reasonable directions than capacity, so I built a framework to produce a single ranking. I started with breadth, measured in active users, and depth, measured in hours per customer, then factored in direct monetization, operational health, durability and development effort.

I used the ranking to constrain the first release so we preserved capacity for the second.

Delay launch by two weeks

I delayed the second release by about two weeks because the beta experience and performance didn't meet the launch-blocking quality standards I had defined. The team had built a new player, a new browse page, new kinds of trending content and faster-refreshing browse surfaces.

I took responsibility for the delay with leadership, and the team launched cleanly without rework.

Write Alexa's six-page narrative

I wrote a six-page narrative to secure Alexa support for spoken requests, in-app search and quick play. Alexa hadn't included the work in its operating plan, and informal requests hadn't changed its priorities.

I described the voice experience customers would get and its customer and business value, then used the document to align director-level stakeholders across Alexa. The Alexa teams took on the work and became active partners in the product.

Outcome

Fire TV Channels reached millions of customers and opened a new video-advertising revenue stream for Amazon. In May 2023, Amazon publicly named the service and described continuously updated content from more than 400 providers across home-screen rows, the Free tab and category pages. In August 2023, after I had left Amazon, the company released a standalone Fire TV Channels app with a sidebar for browsing categories.

What I'd do differently

I would have learned how the merchandising system worked before we built home-screen row pinning. I drove that work to keep our content visible, and it worked, but I later found the implementation required recurring engineering work from another team.

Once I understood the system, I found a smaller change that preserved the behavior and removed the ongoing work. Another Fire TV team adopted it too.

Public record