AFTVnews, the preeminent site for everything Fire TV, is going dormant. At first blush, it appears to be a tremendous loss for us Fire TV owners. However, proprietor Elias Saba has been hired by Amazon and will be well-positioned within the Fire TV team to represent consumers. And it’s a fascinating story arc as Elias has parlayed a once adversarial relationship with Amazon into a critical product management role.
The Fire TV team leaders were very receptive to my feedback and eventually asked if I’d be interested in helping steer the direction of Fire TV devices much earlier in the development process. After meeting more of the Fire TV team and a few more discussions, I was offered a full-time position as a Fire TV Product Manager. […] While I’ll no longer be helping you navigate the minutiae of Fire TV devices from the consumer side of things, I’ll be doing everything I can from the inside out to maintain the top level of quality that you expect from Fire TV devices and, hopefully, even make them better than ever.
I’m super psyched for Elias and know it’ll mean good things for us… as the Fire TV interface and end-user experience would certainly benefit from his expertise. Like the brain teaser of a PIN UI above, navigating through ads to get to meaningful content, equivalent weighting and duplicity of recent apps, temporarily removing app pinning preferences for no good reason, sloppy and incomplete Recast integration, etc.