Imran Mohammed

Amazon Flex’s Advocacy Operations (AO) team is a Hyderabad based team that supports worldwide (WW) Flex Deliver Partner’s (DP) and Flex Operations/Program teams in 7 countries (US, CA, UK, IN, JP, AU, SG) all of which have a diverse set of operational support needs, separate Flex teams and organizations, and unique country specific requirements and challenges, all of which requires coordination and discussion between when launching similar programs.

The Senior Manager, AO is the single thread leader responsible for the AO Operations and Strategy. They lead a team of associates and program managers whose primary responsibility is protecting Driver Experience in the face of defects. In addition to driving operational excellence across driver facing defects, the AO leader actively seeks to optimize AO processes through scale and where possible, improve the DP Experience (DPX) through defect elimination. The AO Leader accomplishes these by directing and influencing a wide group of stakeholders across multiple countries, VP organizations, and job families (operations, program, product, and tech). They are an independent thinker who makes convincing, data-driven decisions. They devise clear strategy, positioning and execution priorities and will be comfortable thinking big and diving deep. They will be a pragmatic visionary who can identify opportunities and lead the team to translate them into workable, scalable product and process solutions.

The Senior Manager oversees the three Operations verticals:
(i) Amazon Flex Response Centre (ARC): ARC provides 24/7 global coverage responding to worldwide (WW) identification, mitigation, and execution response of Large-Scale Events (LSE) impacting Flex DP’s and ensuring we properly proactively communicate before block start (if possible) and exempt drivers from non-controllable defects before standings change, within our Service Level Agreement (SLA). This team closely partners with teams such as Shipping and Delivery Support (SDS), Last Mile Payments (LMP), WW Central Operations (CO) departments, and any site Operations team that utilizes Flex.
(ii) Offline: The Offline team is dedicated to perform backend manual tasks/tickets for Amazon Flex stakeholders that require short term or long-term operational support. While supporting manually repetitive tasks, offline also aims at identifying logics to build long term automated solutions for problems without any impact on DP experience. This team currently supports over 40 processes, which vary from single country processes such as validating DP work eligibility (in specific countries or states) to WW deep-dives of DP concerns to determine if a concern is valid to process payments or provide exemptions to undeliverable packages, and is held to meeting Resolved SLA’s for tickets.
(iii) Central Adjustment Execution Team (CAET): CAET is dedicated to process manual pay adjustments to Flex Delivery partners (DPs) for events LSE’s, mandatory incentives, and marketing campaigns utilizing a specially developed Bulk Adjustment Tool (BAT) and Goodwill adjustment tools. The establishment of this team allowed workload to be centralized from Last Mile Payments (LMP) and unlocked sending bulk payments to drivers (up to current 5000 payments/time through strong partnership with LMP and tech teams) versus the previous standard of 1-by-1 payments, allowing a reduction of paying drivers from days/weeks to hours, and maximizing the drivers we pay within the same payment cycle, with CAET continuing to take on additional use cases as tech is developed.

As the Senior Manager, they are responsible for: ensuring tens of thousands of payments each day so DP’s can be paid next day, otherwise 1% missing payments would add an additional 18k Shipping and Delivery (SDS) contacts and make news coverage; 200k standings adjustments are processed weekly to ensure drivers standings reflect fairly in their Flex Delivery app otherwise drivers will begin contacting SDS and Executive Driver Relations (EDR) via multiple e-mails; and LSE’s must be actioned within minutes to ensure DP’s have the right information about their current/upcoming blocks, or they may show up to a site that’s closed during unsafe blizzard conditions; in addition to 40 other processes that must occur weekly in order to run Flex, from auditing drivers legality to work in Australia to sending reminder texts for pre-6am blocks in NA to drive a +412bps morning attendance rate improvement. Without AO, Flex wouldn’t run.

The Senior Manager oversees the hiring and development of a world-class team, they must take brave and innovative talent decisions to scale teams to business needs and currently oversee the team of 145 people with 14 L4+ leaders. They demonstrate excellent business judgment and have the ability to generate ideas and solve problems independently. They cannot be satisfied with the status quo and need to continually assess the department based on Flex’s evolution, and reinvent as needed, as AO has been redesigned multiple times in the last 3 years based on evolving business needs and new WW support required from the team. Although naturally strategic, they will also have strong operational skills and drive hands on decisions on product roadmap and process execution. The ideal candidate will be experienced leading through leaders and managing the associated executive presence.

• Responsible in setting the vision and direction for the team.
  
• Independently (with limited guidance) manages the lifecycle of complex initiatives, unblocks teams, increases the speed of delivery & negotiates resources and priorities. To support and influence critical business relationships with other support teams, to internal site leadership in order to drive significant and lasting impact.
  
• Improves, streamlines, and/or eliminates excess process & drives efficiencies.
  
• Ability to design and structure internal and external KPIs and metrics in order to gauge the productivity as well as communicate project outcomes with external audiences in a timely fashion.
  
• Puts in place scalable & transparent systems for performance management of his/her team basis the job leveling guidelines of each role. Responsible to transform raw thoughts into clear documentation and requirements (e.g., process charter, statement of work, responsibility matrix, functional requirements, implementation approach, reporting, etc.).
  
• Serves as the point of escalation for people related issues. Responsible to define, review and communicate the automation plan to be followed.

1) Identifying and driving DP experience improvement initiatives,
2) On-the ground launch support for new business, stations, product and process launches and
3) Deep diving station and program escalations.

Additional Job Elements:
• Interface with delivery partners and station personnel.
• Partnering with various teams to advocate for positive DP experience.
• Collaborate with station operations on solving issues impacting the delivery partner experience.
• Monitor delivery station and experience metrics and work with stakeholders on outlier action plans.
• Review feedback channels and partner with program policy and product teams to drive improvement initiatives
• Support business expansion/new site launches and provide post-launch support as required (site selection, launch plan review, etc...)
• Verify that program policies are functional and consistently enforced at delivery stations.
• Promote a delivery partner-centric culture by organizing recognition events, focus group discussions and pilot test groups.

• Introduced new methods, practices, and systems to reduce turnaround time.
• Established positive and effective communication among unit staff and organization leadership, reducing miscommunications, and missed deadlines.
• Set, enforced, and optimized internal policies to maintain responsiveness to demands.
• Implemented process improvement to shape organizational culture, optimize procedures for higher efficiency and help company evolve and grow.
• Analyzed and reported on key performance metrics to senior management.
• Assisted in recruiting, hiring and training of team members.