Setting Amazon Alexa's direction for the coming years: diagnosis, bets and roadmap

You have just joined Amazon's Alexa team as a product manager, and leadership asks you to propose Alexa's product strategy for the next few years. What would you do, and what strategy would you put forward? ```hint Diagnose first A strategy starts from an honest picture of where the product stands. Ask what customers mainly use Alexa for today, how it earns money, and what has changed in assistant technology since it launched. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Does the strategy cover all of Alexa, meaning the assistant, the Echo devices and the developer platform, or only one part of it? - How many years is "the next few", and is there a budget or headcount limit? - What does leadership most want from Alexa over that period: profitability, deeper customer engagement, or support for Amazon's retail and Prime business? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A plan for the first weeks: the data, customers, partners and teams a new PM learns from before committing to a direction. - An honest diagnosis of Alexa's position: its reach into homes, what people use it for, how it makes money, and how newer AI assistants change expectations. - A clear vision with a few strategic bets, each tied to an advantage Amazon actually has, plus an explicit list of what the team stops doing. - Sequencing across the horizon, with milestones and the metric that judges each bet. - Risks such as the cost of serving every request with a large model, privacy and trust, and regressions in the simple commands customers depend on. ### Follow-up Questions - Running a large model on every request costs far more than today's assistant. How does that change your plan for making money? - Leadership wants a measurable result within one year, but your vision needs three. How do you sequence the work to deliver both? - Which bet would you cut first if early numbers disappoint, and which number would tell you?