ETCOM modernized how Amazon authorizes, validates, and deploys tax rules at global scale. I led the end-to-end redesign of critical authoring and deployment workflows, transforming a fragile, Excel-driven process into a governed, auditable platform supporting 800,000+ rules across 19 services.
Strategy · UX · Workflow Design · Cross-Org Alignment
Over a year-long engagement on the Tacoma platform, I partnered closely with Product, Engineering, and Tax Operations to redesign how tax rules move from creation to production at scale.
I joined during the final pre-launch phase, where core functionality was largely in place, and focused on strengthening the tax rule authoring and deployment experience. I identified critical workflow gaps that posed adoption and usability risks, and worked with cross-functional partners to resolve them ahead of launch.
I led a 4-month end-to-end redesign of the deployment workflow, spanning:
Post-launch, I continued working directly with users to understand how teams were transitioning from Excel-based authoring to ETCOM. I synthesized insights across teams, surfaced mental-model mismatches, and translated findings into a prioritized improvement backlog presented to leadership, ensuring the platform evolved with real operational needs.
Amazon’s legacy Rule Management System, built in 2012, had evolved into a high-risk operational bottleneck that managed 800,000+ tax rules across 19 services and processing nearly 13 trillion calculations every month.
Despite this scale, tax rules were still:
At this volume, small mistakes had massive consequences.
In one instance, a single rule issue halted Prime Now orders across four EU markets for several hours. The system was reliable only as long as nothing went wrong, but this was no longer acceptable.
Create and maintain tax rules that directly impact production calculations.
Manual, error-prone authoring with limited visibility into dependencies and downstream impact.
A single mistake can cause incorrect tax calculations or customer-facing outages.
Confidently author rules with clear validation, visibility, and safe deployment.
Validate, approve, and deploy tax rules across regions and services.
Fragmented workflows, manual coordination, and poor visibility into deployment readiness.
Failed or partial deployments that disrupt production and trigger compliance incidents.
Predictable, auditable releases with real-time status and safe rollback options.
ETCOM modernizes how Amazon’s tax teams create and manage tax rules. Previously, tax analysts had to download Excel files, make changes offline, and re-upload them often juggling Slack threads to coordinate who was editing what. It was slow, error-prone, and mentally exhausting. With ETCOM rule authoring happens directly on the platform, where updates are instantly visible to everyone.
Each change is tracked, clearly showing who made what edits, which has greatly improved transparency and collaboration. Testing and deployment are now streamlined, saving hundreds of manual hours. The next phase,launching this December introduces AI-generated rule authoring from legislation, further accelerating accuracy and efficiency.
Deploy rules as explicit snapshots instead of individual rule releases.
Prevent partial or inconsistent production states.
Predictable releases, safer rollbacks, and fewer production incidents.
Designed a step-based deployment experience instead of exposing raw engineering pipelines.
Business users lacked visibility and confidence in developer-centric tools.
Faster adoption and reduced dependency on engineering support.
Centralized deployment status, ownership, and audit history in one place.
Fragmented ownership increased risk and slowed incident response.
Clear accountability, faster issue resolution, and compliance confidence.
Rule changes lived across spreadsheets and services.
Teams coordinated changes through email and Slack.
Validation happened late, often after bundling.
Deployments were slow and unpredictable.
Rules authored and managed in one platform.
Ownership, status, and readiness visible in real time.
Validation and testing embedded in the workflow.
Releases were predictable, auditable, and safer.
High-fidelity wireframes visualizing the new consolidated workflows.
The legacy system does not have step by step guidance or tracking mechanism to help users update on the progress.
ETCOM provides easy rule(s) selection mechanism.
Engineering preference for reusing the existing code deployment pipeline UI
Non-technical users lacked visibility and deployment confidence
Live walkthroughs paired with quantified usability and error risk analysis
Alignment on a simplified, guided deployment experience
To validate adoption and de-risk rollout, we conducted structured walkthroughs with end users before and after launch.
“ETCOM turned my ‘Thursday-palooza’ into a ‘One-Hit Wonder.’ Now it’s just one validation, one click, one success email—and I get an hour of my day back. That’s not just time saved, that’s freedom.”
“Publishing Gamma rules is now straightforward. ETCOM automatically deploys the right file version, removing extra manual steps.”
“This new testing strategy builds real resilience—preventing errors before release and strengthening customer trust.”
“Deployments run smoothly. I’d love to see consuming host visibility added back, but the new workflow already improves accuracy and confidence.”
ETCOM transformed tax rule deployment from a fragile, manual process into a reliable, governed platform operating at global scale.
Beyond efficiency gains, the work reshaped how teams reason about readiness, ownership, and the balance between speed and compliance.
Most importantly, ETCOM established a foundation where automation could be trusted because governance was built into the system, enabling the next phase of AI-assisted rule creation, explored as a separate case study.
