Launching Amazon Flex in Spain

The mandate

Amazon Logistics and Prime Now were the internal clients. They set the delivery capacity they needed from Flex, and my job was to make sure the supply side existed to absorb it: enough onboarded, background-checked drivers, and launch-ready sites for them to pick up from. Marketing owned the top of the driver acquisition funnel. I owned everything between a signup and a driver leaving a station with orders in their car.

The funnel that died in the middle

In our trials, signups were huge and almost nobody made it through to onboarded driver. I dug into where applications were stalling and took two findings to the app development team in Seattle: the name fields rejected accent marks, and the last-name field would not accept a space. Most Spanish names carry at least one accent, and everyone has two surnames. Two small validation rules were quietly filtering out nearly the entire country. Once the app accepted Spanish names, the funnel unblocked end to end.

Addresses with no number

Driver performance was measured on delivery time, and those targets assumed geolocation that works. In Spain, a legitimate address can read “Calle Mayor, S/N”: sin número, no street number at all. Holding a Madrid driver to the same clock as a London driver, where addressing is extremely precise, would have punished people for the country’s infrastructure. I worked out adjusted delivery-time standards for the market so the KPI measured the driver and not the map.

The vendor that was ready until I called in Spanish

Every driver had to pass a background check before their first block. Amazon’s US background-check vendor confirmed they were ready for the Spain launch. I called them one day and opened the conversation in Spanish. Nobody there could continue it. Running background checks on Spanish applicants with no Spanish speaker on staff was going to fail, and getting one hired and trained pushed our timeline back. It delayed the launch, and it was still far cheaper to find that gap weeks before launch than the morning of.

Classification risk, city rules, and public opinion

Spain already had a large delivery gig economy, but a company Amazon’s size drew far more scrutiny than the local players. Worker misclassification was the legal risk: past a certain number of hours, a contractor starts to look like an employee. I worked with the app team to cap driver hours in the product itself, and with Amazon Spain’s public policy lead on everything from the gig-economy narrative to municipal details like Madrid’s rotating license-plate restrictions in the city center, which directly shaped how we scheduled drivers. When the Catalan independence referendum hit in late 2017, planning for Barcelona went ambiguous overnight and we resequenced the launch order around it.

Making sites Flex-ready

A site was ready when a driver could show up, park, scan the right shelving, find their orders, and get out quickly. That standard had to hold at two very different kinds of locations: Amazon Logistics delivery stations and third-party partner stores, including grocery stores serving Prime Now. Getting that flow right at both site types was most of my pre-launch site work.

The launch

We launched first in Valencia, delivering Prime Now grocery orders from a third-party store, then Madrid. By the time I handed off the program in 2018, Flex was operating nine sites across Spain, Barcelona included.