Designing an exit flow that gives people a reason to stay

Context

Before this project, Amazon had no unified, self-service way for employees to resign, understand what happened next, or find resources that might address the reason they were leaving. As lead designer, I owned the end-to-end experience in the A to Z app on mobile and web, working across Engineering, Product, Legal, Compliance, and People Experience leadership, from strategy through ship.

On the surface it was a multi-step form with conditional logic. Underneath, it was a set of human tensions, and the most valuable work I did happened before the first screen existed.

Challenge 1: Five teams, five definitions of success

Every group had a legitimate stake. Employees in distress needed empathy, not bureaucracy. Legal and Compliance needed precise language, documented consent, and airtight data capture. HR leadership wanted the flow to surface retention options without feeling manipulative. Product and Engineering needed something that would scale globally.

What worked: alignment before wireframes

I started by meeting with People Experience leadership to agree on a shared vision, including objective retention metrics and a clear picture of how the experience would affect the people using it. Then I facilitated workshops with stakeholders across all five groups.

Getting alignment early wasn’t a courtesy. It was a design decision. Those sessions surfaced assumptions that would otherwise have become friction in reviews, and gave us a shared framework we returned to every time a tradeoff came up.

Challenge 2: Two populations, two legal frameworks

The flow had to serve full-time employees and contingent workers, who operate under different access policies and legal protections. Designing for one and adapting for the other would have broken in subtle ways.

What worked: parallel service blueprints

We interviewed current employees who had considered resigning and former employees who had followed through. From that, we built service blueprints that tracked both populations side by side, making it visible where their needs diverged and where a single design could serve both. That dual-journey framework has since become a methodology reference for later People Experience work.

Challenge 3: Offering alternatives without manipulating people

HR wanted retention options in the flow. Employees needed to feel respected, not sold to. Get the balance wrong and the whole experience reads as a trap.

What worked: let the reason drive the resources

The flow opens with a personal acknowledgment, then asks for the primary reason for leaving, followed by a drill-down specific to that reason. Everything after that is shaped by the answer. Someone leaving for growth sees training resources, career development materials, and a connection to the A to Z Assistant. Someone leaving over scheduling sees alternate shift options.

Just as important, the design protects autonomy. The final step shows a full summary with inline editing before submission, and makes clear that employees can change their mind up to 24 hours before their last day. The cancel modal adds deliberate friction to confirm intent without being obstructive.

Challenge 4: Making the case for an investment in people

The hardest challenge was justifying the project at all. It didn’t generate revenue. Proving its value meant translating human outcomes like retention and satisfaction into financial ones.

What worked: model the cost of attrition

I modeled the recruiting spend, onboarding time, and productivity loss of replacing a departing employee, and compared it against the retention lift the flow produced. That financial argument secured sustained organizational commitment, and changed how People Experience leadership evaluated employee-facing investments afterward.

The pivot that changed the product

Midway through, research and stakeholder conversations surfaced a defining insight. Employees didn’t just want more training. They wanted access to training from other teams across Amazon. They weren’t trying to do their current job better. They were trying to see a path forward inside the company.

That reframed the product. What started as a resignation form became a retention intervention, centered on an Explore hub offering career growth resources, team openings and leader profiles, flex shift options, and self-service resignation in one place. Each pathway was a potential reason to stay.

Results

The flow delivered a measurable reduction in attrition among the populations it served, positive movement in NPS, and a modeled, demonstrated reduction in recruiting spend. The integration pattern between a structured form and the A to Z Assistant now underpins other self-service HR features.