Amazon
Writing and field notes from Rob Kleiman's work with Amazon.
• Building Communities, Field Notes
Delivering DevCon 2025
Amazon's largest internal engineering conference was mid-planning when its leadership departed. I stepped in to own the content strategy and get 11,000 engineers a program worth their time.
• Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes
Giving Amazon a Voice in the Developer Productivity Conversation
Google-backed frameworks like DORA and SPACE dominated how the industry talked about developer productivity. I led the content strategy that put Amazon's Cost-to-Serve framework into that conversation.
• Developer Adoption, Field Notes
When Engineers Stop Trusting an AI Agent
After an AI coding agent launched, developers started reporting answers they couldn't rely on. The fix wasn't more marketing. It was a product change I helped get onto the roadmap.
• Developer Adoption, Field Notes
Installed Isn't Adopted: Rolling Out an AI Coding Assistant to Amazon's Engineers
Getting engineers to install an AI coding tool was the easy part. Getting them to keep using it took hands-on workshops, a churn dashboard and a four-layer way of measuring adoption.
• Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes
Turning an Orphaned Talk Show into a Change-Management Engine
I inherited a talk show with no owner and no purpose. We rebuilt it around three use cases and made it the main way the company learned to use its AI tools.
• Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes
From Blasting Everyone to Reaching the Right Engineers
Hundreds of product managers were announcing features to tens of thousands of engineers with no audience strategy. We built the personas, standards and governance to fix it.
• Developer Adoption, Field Notes
Making Software Health a Habit Across a Huge Engineering Org
Coding standards, merge practices and CI/CD hygiene varied from team to team. Turning 'better software health' into a company-wide habit took research, real case studies and a repeatable review rhythm.
• Storytelling & Thought Leadership, Field Notes
Building an Employer Brand Developers Actually Respond To
Our team competed for engineers against companies with much stronger stories about what it's like to build there. A competitive audit gave us language that worked.
• Developer Adoption, Field Notes
Finding the Developer Bottleneck Worth Fixing
With limited bandwidth and no playbook, I built a way to combine usage data with what developers were actually saying. It pointed straight at code upgrades.