Music and travel photography for all your music and travel needs. https://www.flickr.com/people/hilgendorf/

As the founder and leader the AXBR (advertising UX bar raising program) I drove culture change working alongside leaders, product managers, and designers to align their product and feature ideas with true customer needs and usable software. I co-authored over 70 "working backwards" documents. These well-known and required papers are key to Amazon's success as they drive internal discussion at a detailed level and are used to secure resources each year. The individual instruction and the templates I developed coordinated the language and concepts of advertising within the organization and positively impacted the speed at which new ideas became roadmap items within Amazon Advertising.With the guerilla-style launch of the Run the Store program, I provided practical advertising experience to a huge (and rapidly growing) staff who'd never created or managed digital advertising--less than 10% of the employees in the organization had any hands-on experience with self-service advertising. Participants created and managed live ad campaigns with real consumer brands and real budgets over a course of one to two months. In the first year alone, over 400 Amazonian participants graduated the program with the basic customer knowledge and empathy needed to deliver better advertising products.

I ran the user experience design, brand, social media, and editorial teams across Rhapsody/Napster. Our goal was to have a profound impact on music lovers. We did so with elegant apps, beautiful content, bright words, and small budgets.

I ran the UX team at AWS (Amazon.com's cloud computing division). I grew and lead a team of 14 designers and researchers who delivered the research, design, and testing of each of the (then) 23 (and growing) products within the AWS Management Console.

BlueDisguise Records is my record label. It is very quiet these days. But back then it was a blast....near perfectly round music was created, packaged, distributed, and sold in record stores. Our records were reviewed in Rolling Stone, NPR, MSNBC, The Big Takeover, Paste Magazine and a zillion websites. We featured local and international artists such as Visqueen, Downpilot, The Whirligigs, Thee Emergency, Missouri, Fey Ray, The Young Fresh Fellows, The Presidents of the USA, Robyn Hitchcock, the Silos, The Maroons, the Figgs, Charlie Chesterman, The Makers...and many more. Ask and I shall tell.

I oversaw the product marketing and delivered the value proposition, stunning design, and fantastic original content to KIN.com. Our award-winning site was a compelling mix of brand storytelling through music, product information/demonstration, photography / video, and social media.

I managed the retail digital marketing efforts--both in-store and online for the Zune brand. I coordinated marketing efforts across dozens of physical and .com retail outlets including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Target, WalMart, Game Stop, Sears, CompUSA, and CircuitCity. My key accomplishments include are the creation of on-device attract loops that have become a standard in in-store displays, the retrofitting of in-store displays to meet the V2 launch and brand aesthetic, and the dynamic delivery of digital assets/experiences to online retailers. I managed marketing of Zune Originals to include a revamp of the packaging and out-of-box expereince which dramatically cut cost while improved customer expereince as well as creating a new content strategy for custom devices--primarily the zodiac sereies featuring original art by Catalina Estrada and Isofatu Sua. I also created and managed key content deliverables in support of key XBox 360 game releases including a custom Rooster Teeth "Red vs. Blue" series and the retail integration of the "Believe" ARG in support of the Halo 3 launch.

I obsessed over making Amazon.com a great place to buy music. I worked to balance the mix of our brilliant robots (collaborative filtering) and our passionate people to put the best possible music discoveries in front of Amazon customers. I'm most proud of the artist recommendations series I spawned (Music You Should Hear) while reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles. By the end we had hundreds of artists (Lucinda Williams, Rufus Wainwright, Bob Dylan, Motorhead, Elvis Costello, Kings of Leon....) willfully making music recommendations from the darkest deepest corners of their collections and their inspirations. We picked, placed, sold, and sold music by the gallon. Lots of it. There was nothing like it and there never will be again--as far as the CD is concerned.

I was the fifth designer hired by Amazon.com. I believe I was hired out of my sheer enthusiasm for music, a huge belief in customer experience, and some passable design thinking. A typical week in those early days consisted every possible aspect of visual, interaction, and user experience design--both on the website and in print. One moment I was working to add new features and function to the website, the next I was creating billboard (the kind you drive by in your car) advertisements to support our hiring initiatives, art-directing category illustrations for the music store, and brainstorming for how we might display messages from Jeff Bezos to Amazon customers (resulting in the famed "Jeff letters" on the front page of the website.) My highlights are countless. Some faves were launching the first-ever commercial music download experience, creating the Search Inside experience in books, launching Segway, winning a Just Do It award, participating in the hiring of fantastic people, and watching culture evolve. I am lucky and grateful.

I was on the team that built the newspaper every week. By hand. Then came the computers. And then we still built the newspaper by hand. But we were among the first to publish an alt-weekly with dynamic content. The Allaire brothers borrowed space from us and helped us in return. It was nothing like anyone had seen before. It set the foundation. I also trained the entire staff on using email, Netscape, and working on a network, in general. That was fun!

I started a program to sell samples, test products, and refurbish returned goods to Rollerblade employees. I ate sandwiches at lunch. Annual revenue exceeded 250k.