Q&A with Bard Luippold, Principal Product Manager for WW Returns & ReCommerce

Everyone, meet Bard ?? True to his name, Bard shares his Amazon story with us! Bard is currently the Principal Product Manager for the Net Cost of Refunds and Concessions team within WW Returns & ReCommerce. In this role, Bard supports a variety of programs related to reducing process defects that lead to negative Customer experience and refunds.

Bard, what accomplishment at Amazon are you most proud of??

At Amazon, I’ve had the opportunity to work in some really fun and interesting areas from achieving a Senior team (“S-team”) goal by launching new features to support Apparel, Shoes, Luggage, and Jewelry categories on the old Vendor Express website to experimenting to reduce defects and costs while preserving an excellent Customer experience in my current role. I am most proud, though, of the four years that I spent as a product manager for A+ Content, which enables Customers to learn about brand and product value through rich, immersive images, video, and text on product detail pages. I led the convergence of disparate Seller and Vendor tools into a single, new A+ Content Manager, the first application to be accessible from both Seller Central and Vendor Central, and then worked with the team and partners to build a bunch of new features into the system, including new “From the Brand” and “Focus on Sustainability” content types, recommendations for how to build content to increase sales, and the ability to publish and manage content through the Selling Partner API and automatically translate content to other languages and countries. I feel particularly proud of the “From the Brand” content, which I was able to build from small initial prototype to an immersive, carousel experience that many of my favorite brands now use to tell their story, curate portfolios of products for Customers to explore, and link to their Amazon store.

What is your favorite Amazon memory?

I had the privilege of participating in the launch of the Climate Pledge Friendly shopping program in September 2020. The A+ Content team had worked really hard and overcome a lot of challenges during the Spring and Summer of 2020, partnering with Detail Page and Sustainability teams, to create a new “Focus on Sustainability” content type that would work with several other features across the shopping experience to help Customers identify and learn about products with Climate Pledge Friendly-eligible certification. On September 22nd, 2020, I watched from the virtual launch room as teams from across the company tested and launched their features and then published and tested special content for the new Compact by Design certification in advance of Jeff Bezos’ announcement. I went to bed very satisfied and strangely energized from having been part of something that helps Customers make more sustainable shopping choices at a massive scale.

Bard, what excites you about your role and team??

I love using data to dive into problems and find overlooked or underappreciated solutions. That is what the Net Cost of Refunds and Concessions (NCRC) team within WW Returns & ReCommerce does! Amazon scaled super-fast to serve vital Customer needs during Covid. In my role, I work with expert teams across our Customer-facing stores to identify and address any process defects to improve the Customer experience and reduce costs for our Customers and Selling Partners. We have made great progress together and I am excited about some of the investments we are making to improve even more in the future.??

What is your favorite Amazon leadership principle and why?

I don’t have one favorite leadership principle, I have two: Bias for Action and Insist on the Highest Standards. As context, I am a huge fan of the leadership principles because many of them exist in tension with each other and that tension provides a common language and a framework for making tough decisions. The key to existing in this tension and using these leadership principles to make decisions is the concept of one way door / two way door decisions. When I was launching the new A+ Content Manager with the A+ Content team, we did extra rounds of analysis, testing, and verification because certain things would be very difficult to change or roll back. We still needed to work through a number of challenging issues during launch, but the extra iterations to insist on the highest standards helped us move through those challenges faster and gave us confidence that we were on the right track. Toward the other end of the spectrum, with the Online Return Center, we have been able to move faster to test and iterate on changes and gather better information because our experiments can be dialed down more quickly, having less impact on Customer experience.

Bard, what is your favorite place you have ever traveled to?

I had the privilege of studying abroad in Moscow, Russia, in college, volunteering for four months in Santiago, Chile, and traveling to many interesting places while working at World Vision International, a large Christian humanitarian organization. However, the memories I treasure the most are from the nearly two months my wife, two daughters, and I spent living in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2014 while we were adopting our son, Max. Most mornings were spent visiting Max at his orphanage and taking care of paperwork and other errands as part of the process. But we were able to spend most afternoons walking through the Maidan square, which was still full of barricades and signs of their recent Revolution of Dignity, riding the subway to tour beautiful cathedrals, museums, and cultural sites from Kyiv’s 1000+ year history, and eating some great food (best hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted – “melted drinking chocolate” from Lviv Handmade Chocolate).?

What do you do for fun, and how do you manage worklife balance?

Most of my spare time revolves around caring for Max, who has multiple disabilities and behavioral special needs which have grown more complex as he has grown older, and being there for my wife and our other two children. This has been very challenging for our family, especially amid the ongoing shortage of care workers nationally, and I feel very fortunate that both Amazon and our WW Returns & ReCommerce organization value diversity and inclusion. My manager and HR partner have taken the time to learn about my family’s situation and provided flexibility to help me achieve harmony between my commitments at work and the needs of my family, especially as Amazon has returned to the office in person. When we are able to make space in our lives, our family loves to go out to Oyhut Bay and Damon Point on the southern tip of Ocean Shores, WA, go hiking and boating in the beautiful Pacific Northwest (we saw a pod of orcas and a humpback whale on the SAME DAY this summer!), and cook things that we grow in our little garden and the gardens of our neighbors (several varieties of spaghetti sauce, kale & white bean soup, strawberry rhubarb crumble, and plum freezer jam with ginger and cardamom have been my favorites this year).

Thanks for sharing your Amazon story with us, Bard! To learn even more about Bard's team, visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/wwrr.