AmazonAmazon's health and wellness team had a hypothesis: the broader Amazon ecosystem — grocery, reorders, household services — could play a meaningful role in how people pursue and maintain their health and wellness goals. Not necessarily through a wearable. Not necessarily through any single product. The question was bigger and more open-ended than that.
I co-led an exploratory research effort with another senior researcher to investigate it. We recruited ten participants across the SF Bay Area and Chicago — people who had successfully changed and maintained healthier eating habits for six months or more, with real food-decision authority in their households, mixed across age (26–50), gender, and household composition. Sessions were two-hour, 1:1 in-home interviews. The in-home format was deliberate: health and wellness happens in the kitchen, the bathroom, the closet, the garage — not in a focus group room.
To structure what we heard, we used a Diet Journey framework — Goal Setting → Assess → Prepare → Act (Eat / Purchase / Manage) → Track — which gave us a shared language across messy lived behavior. We surfaced the patterns and tensions in how people maintain (and abandon) wellness goals: the trial-and-error path most people walk, why prescriptive diets fall apart, where accountability succeeds and fails, why tracking apps go obsolete in 3–6 months, the gap between intention and reality at the grocery store. We also pressure-tested four concept directions with participants and made pursue / modify / revise recommendations on each.
The biggest finding was an unmet need we framed as the "Big Opportunity": helping people transition from defined, measurable goals (lose 15 lbs, lower cholesterol) to abstract, sustaining goals (more energy, feel better) — the phase where most tools drop out and people fall back into yo-yo cycles. The research informed early thinking about how Amazon could show up in health beyond any single device.
My role: Co-lead researcher (study design, recruiting, in-home fieldwork in two markets, Diet Journey synthesis, concept evaluation, opportunity framing).
