Answering Behavioral

Questions in Amazon
Interviews
Advice for Candidates at All Levels

BY JENNIFER SCUPI

Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Scupi. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed,

or transmitted in any form or by any means, including
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Introduction ................................................................................. 13
Use This Book As a Guide for Your Amazon Behavioral
Interview Prep ..................................................................... 13
Why Should You Trust Me? ..................................................... 14
My Information Is Real ............................................................ 15
Who Is This Information For? ................................................... 15
What About the Technical Content of Answers?............... 15
Can I Guarantee Results? ...................................................... 16
The Secrets to Successful Behavioral Question Answers ... 16
Is This Book Right for You? ...................................................... 17
How to Use the Book .............................................................. 17
Managing Interview Stress ..................................... 19
How to Minimize Stress Before Your Interview ..................... 19
Practice answers using Amazon’s preferred style .......... 20
Don’t wait until the last minute to start ............................ 20
Spend as much time as you can preparing ................... 20
Manage Stress During the Onsite Interview ........................ 21
Fly in earlier than necessary............................................... 21
Prepare yourself mentally .................................................. 21
What about breaks? ........................................................... 22
Bring snacks.......................................................................... 22
Plan for lunch ....................................................................... 22
Stand up ............................................................................... 22
Make a strategy for dealing with difficult people .......... 23
Amazon Interview Process Basics ........................ 25
Screening Interviews ............................................................... 26
Who conducts the screening interviews? ....................... 26
Are screening interviews difficult? .................................... 26
On-Site / Loop Interviews ....................................................... 27
Who conducts the onsite/Loop interviews? .................... 27
How do job levels fit in?...................................................... 28
The “Bar Raiser” ....................................................................... 29
Who (or what) is the “bar raiser”? .................................... 29
How will you know who the bar raiser is? ........................ 29
How can you prepare for the bar raiser if you won’t
know who it is? ................................................................ 30
Are there any clues who the bar raiser is? ...................... 30
What is the bar raiser’s task exactly? ............................... 30
Will everyone have a bar raiser in their interview? ......... 31
How do I prepare for the bar raiser? ................................ 31
Bar raiser questions with examples ................................... 32
Lunch Buddy ............................................................................ 32
Lunch buddy etiquette ...................................................... 33
Can I skip lunch? ................................................................. 33
Hiring Meeting ......................................................................... 34
How Long Does the Process Take?....................................... 34
If You Don’t Get the Job ........................................................ 34
Taking Notes in the Interview................................................. 34
Video Interviews ...................................................... 36
How to Have a Successful Chime Interview ....................... 36
1. Practice with Chime ....................................................... 36
2. Sit in a quiet place .......................................................... 38
3. Look your interviewer in the eyes.................................. 39
4. Cheat ................................................................................ 39
5. Show a clean background............................................ 40
The Amazon Behavioral Interview ........................ 41
Which Type of Interview Will Have Behavioral
Questions?........................................................................... 41
When Should I Prepare for Behavioral Questions? ............. 42
Will They Really Ask Me Behavioral Questions in the
Screening Interview? ......................................................... 42
Will They Really Ask Me Basic Questions in the
Behavioral Interview? ........................................................ 42
Amazon Written Interview Question ..................... 43
What Topic Will the Amazon Written Interview Question
Cover? ................................................................................. 43
Written interview question option one ............................. 43
Written interview question option two ............................. 43
When Is the Amazon Written Interview Question Due? ..... 44
How Long Should the Answer to the Amazon Writing
Exercise Be? ........................................................................ 44
Essay Basics .............................................................................. 44
How Is the Amazon Written Exercise Related to the
Behavioral Questions? ....................................................... 45
Amazon Writing Sample Answer Structure .......................... 45
Paragraph 1 – introduction ................................................ 45
Problem section................................................................... 45
Action section...................................................................... 46
Results section...................................................................... 46
Last paragraph – conclusion ............................................. 46
Did You Answer the Question? ............................................. 46
Does My Writing Need to Be Perfect? ................................. 47
Language Tips ......................................................................... 48
Sample Answers ...................................................................... 49
Mistake #1 – Failing to add an introductory
paragraph ....................................................................... 49
Mistake #2 – Failing to provide context ........................... 50
Mistake #3 – Giving too much background ................... 53
Mistake #4 – Failing to detail your “Action” .................... 53
Mistake #5 – Failing to describe impact .......................... 55
Behavioral Interview Basics ................................... 58
How Do I Know It’s a Behavioral Question? ........................ 58
“How” Questions Are Behavioral Questions ........................ 58
Why Do Interviewers Use Behavioral Questions? ................ 59
Who Should Prepare for Behavioral Questions? ................. 60
Introduction to the Amazon Leadership Principles ............ 61
Why are the principles important? ................................... 61
How the leadership principles are used in interviews .... 62
How do I pass the principles test? .................................... 63
How will you be asked about the principles? ................. 63
The principles are the basis for behavioral questions .... 63
The Fourteen Principles........................................................... 64
Preparing for Your Interview .................................. 67
Predicting the Interview Questions ....................................... 67
How to Find Out What Question Topics You’ll Get ............. 67
Use the job title .................................................................... 67
Analyze the job description ............................................... 68
Use more than one job description .................................. 70
Use the industry.................................................................... 71
Prepare for questions about your resume ....................... 71
Question Topics by Seniority Level ........................................ 71
Questions Specifically for Leaders and Managers ............. 73
Hire and Develop the Best ................................................. 74
Are Right, A Lot .................................................................... 75
Bias for Action ...................................................................... 76
Customer Obsession ........................................................... 76
Deliver Results ...................................................................... 77
Ownership ............................................................................ 77
Think Big ................................................................................ 78
Dive Deep ............................................................................ 78
Earn Trust ............................................................................... 78
Frugality ................................................................................ 79
Have Backbone .................................................................. 79
Insist on Highest Standards ................................................. 79
Invent and Simplify .............................................................. 80
Learn and Be Curious ......................................................... 80
How Behavioral Interview Answers Are Rated .... 82
Amazon Interview Rating Scale ............................................ 82
How to Know What Categories You’ll Get Rated On ........ 84
What will get me the highest rating? ............................... 86
How to give better answers ............................................... 87
Using Stories ............................................................. 91
How Many Different Stories Do I Need? .............................. 91
Create a pool of stories ...................................................... 92
Tailor each story .................................................................. 92
But really, how many stories will I need? .......................... 93
How to Track Your Stories ....................................................... 93
Can I Write Your Stories for You? ........................................... 94
What Makes a Good Story? .................................................. 95
How to Create Your Stories: Brainstorming .......................... 96
Plan stories based on the functional competencies ..... 97
How to get enough details for your stories ...................... 97
Don’t Use Personal Stories ...................................................... 98
Story Structure .......................................................................... 99
The STAR method ................................................................ 99
What is the STAR technique? ............................................. 99
Do I actually need to use a structure in my answers? . 101
PAR not STAR.......................................................................... 102
A good sample answer for a common behavioral
question ......................................................................... 103
SOAR Versus STAR Versus PAR ............................................. 103
Which structure should you use to answer behavioral
questions?...................................................................... 103
Situation / Problem............................................................ 105
Task / Obstacle .................................................................. 105
Action ................................................................................. 106
Result / Impact .................................................................. 106
Lessons learned ................................................................. 107
Selling Yourself in Interviews .............................. 108
What Is Selling Yourself? ....................................................... 108
Why Is Self-Promotion Hard for Some People? ................. 108
Can You Improve Your Self-Promotion Skills? .................... 109
Why Do I Need to Sell Myself? ............................................. 109
Selling Yourself Isn’t Being Fake ........................................... 110
Focus on Your Core Messages ............................................ 111
Plan your core messages / core competencies .......... 111
How many core messages should you have? .............. 112
Your core messages should be on your resume
already........................................................................... 112
Check your core messages against the job
description..................................................................... 112
Examples of core messages ............................................ 113
Rank your selling points in order of most important to
least important.............................................................. 116
Make up general statements or examples for your
core messages.............................................................. 117
How do you use these selling points? ............................ 118
Where can you use your core messages? .................... 118
Which Leadership Principle Is This Question
Asking Me About? .................................................................... 119
Shortcut .................................................................................. 119
Consider the principles as a whole ................................ 120
Use the shortcut instead of panicking............................ 121
Am I Overanalyzing? ............................................................ 122
The Bottom Line ..................................................................... 123
How to Answer Questions About Each
Leadership Principle ................................................................. 124
Customer Obsession ............................................................. 124
What are examples of “Customer Obsession”
questions in Amazon interviews? ............................... 125
How to answer “Customer Obsession” questions......... 127
Sample answers for “Customer Obsession” questions . 128
Ownership .............................................................................. 139
Top five Amazon interview questions related to
“Ownership” .................................................................. 140
Sample answers for the top five “Ownership”
questions........................................................................ 140
Invent and Simplify................................................................ 146
Top five Amazon interview questions asking about
“Invent and Simplify” ................................................... 147
Are Right, A Lot ...................................................................... 152
Three common interview questions for “Are Right, A
Lot” ................................................................................. 153
The mistake or failure questions ...................................... 153
Interpersonal conflict questions ...................................... 159
The judgement or data questions .................................. 161
Other possible interview questions for this principle ..... 163
Learn and Be Curious ........................................................... 165
Format for answering “Learn and Be Curious”
questions........................................................................ 167
Sample answers for “Learn and Be Curious” ................ 167
Hire and Develop the Best ................................................... 170
Who will get asked about this principle? ....................... 171
Interview questions related to this principle .................. 171
How to answer questions related to this principle ........ 172
Sample answers for “Hire and Develop” ....................... 174
Insist on the Highest Standards ............................................ 177
Interview questions related to “Insist on the Highest
Standards” ..................................................................... 179
How to answer questions related to “Insist on the
Highest Standards”....................................................... 180
Think Big .................................................................................. 182
Interview questions related to “Think Big” ..................... 183
How to answer questions related to “Think Big” ........... 184
Bias for Action ........................................................................ 187
Interview questions related to “Bias for Action” ........... 189
How to answer questions related to “Bias for Action” . 191
Frugality .................................................................................. 193
Interview questions related to “Frugality”...................... 194
How to answer questions related to “Frugality” ........... 194
Earn Trust................................................................................. 196
Interview questions related to “Earn Trust” .................... 198
How to answer questions related to “Earn Trust” .......... 199
Dive Deep .............................................................................. 203
Interview questions related to “Dive Deep” ................. 205
How to answer questions related to “Dive Deep” ....... 205
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit ........................... 209
Interview questions related to “Have Backbone” ........ 210
How to answer the questions related to “Have
Backbone” .................................................................... 211
Deliver Results ........................................................................ 216
How to answer questions related to “Deliver Results” . 217
Interview questions related to “Deliver Results”............ 217
Sample answers for “Deliver Results”.............................. 218
Follow-Up Questions ........................................... 221
Follow-Up Question Format ................................................. 221
Use Real Stories ...................................................................... 221
Possible Follow-Up Questions............................................... 221
Questions about the beginning of your story
(Situation/Task/Problem) ............................................. 221
Questions about the middle of your story (Action) ...... 222
Questions about the end of your story (Results) ........... 223
Avoiding Common Mistakes ............................. 224
Add Data to Your Answers .................................................. 224
Example of an answer with data .................................... 224
Analysis of “mediocre” versus “better” answers........... 225
I Versus We ............................................................................. 226
Stalling .................................................................................... 227
Don’t panic ........................................................................ 227
Emergency techniques for stalling in the interview ..... 227
After the interview ............................................... 230
Send a Thank You Note........................................................ 230
What format should the thank you note be in? ........... 230
When should you send the thank you? ......................... 230
What to say in the thank you note ................................. 231
Thank you email template ............................................... 231
Thank you email example #1 .......................................... 232
Example #2 ........................................................................ 232
Send a LinkedIn Connection Request ............................... 233
LinkedIn connection request template ......................... 233
What if I don’t have their email address? ..................... 233
About the Author ...................................................................... 234
Introduction
Are you nervous about answering Amazon behavioral
interview questions?

If you’re worried about the behavioral questions at your

Amazon job interview, you’re not alone.

No one likes behavioral interview questions. Technical

people aren’t used to talking about their skills in story format
and salespeople don’t like sticking to a specific format. New
interviewers can’t remember all the rules to follow in the
answers and experienced interviewers don’t like using such
a strict format.

Also, if you’re like most people, you’ve probably forgotten

what you did at your old jobs so the idea of writing stories for
the answers seems impossible.

Not to mention it’s intimidating to interview with Amazon, the

company everyone wants to work for these days, right?

Use This Book As a Guide for Your Amazon

Behavioral Interview Prep
If you’re worried about your behavioral interview questions,
you need a guide on your interview journey who can take
you step by step through the knowledge and techniques
you need to answer these types of questions. This book can
be your guide.

There’s a lot of information out there about Amazon

behavioral questions. But you don’t have to read it all
yourself – I’ve put all the necessary information together in
one place to make it easy for you to learn what you need.
If you’ve seen my website before, you might have read
some of the information I’m going to mention in the book.
My interview coaching clients asked me for a guide that
was in a book format, so they didn’t have to read all the
blog posts. The book and blog are not quite the same – the
book has more examples and more background and
explanation, and the information is collected in one place.

Why Should You Trust Me?

When I started interview coaching, I didn’t know much
about Amazon, except from shopping there. But then I
worked with hundreds of Amazon job seekers and realized I
had begun to be an expert on Amazon interviews.

From working with all of these clients, I gained knowledge

about how Amazon hires and what it values. I realized the
Amazon interview is seen as difficult because of the
behavioral questions and leadership principles. The
interviewers use these questions because they want to learn
about candidates and also because they think this type of
question will prevent bias in hiring, but these questions cause
the interviewees stress.

My goal is to share my knowledge with you, the interviewee,

so you’ll have as little stress as possible during your
preparation.

After being an interview coach for six years, there is no one

on this planet who has coached more Amazon candidates
than I have (except the Amazon recruiters). I’ve coached
thousands. That is not an exaggeration. I used to say I’d
coached hundreds, but I finally had to admit it had gotten
into the thousands. I do this full time, and many of my clients
these days are Amazon candidates. I also work with
candidates going for jobs at the other tech companies as
well as non-tech companies, but the largest volume of my
clients are applying to Amazon.

If you want to know more about me you can read my About

page or look at my LinkedIn profile.

My Information Is Real
The information in this book is based on feedback from
successful (and unsuccessful) candidates. The questions I
give you to study were all asked during my clients’
interviews. The answers are the ones that got them into
Amazon.

Who Is This Information For?

The information in this book applies to all positions at
Amazon, from entry level to C-level, and all divisions,
including AWS. I’ve had clients interviewing for many roles in
different locations like Luxembourg, Germany, the UK, India,
and the US, and they all found my information to be useful.

What About the Technical Content of Answers?

I’m not a technical person so I’m not going to be able to
advise you on the technical content of your answers.
Behavioral interviewing is a combination of soft skills and
hard skills – the ability to communicate and the knowledge
of your field. I’m not going to have the knowledge of your
field that you have and in the case of technical job
candidates I won’t know much about the technical details.
My advice is on the communication or soft skill side of
interviewing, although I’ve seen so many stories, I can tell
you if yours is on par with your competitors.
Can I Guarantee Results?
I’d like to tell you that every single one of my clients got
hired. Unfortunately, most of my clients don’t write to me
afterward and tell me. Quite a few of them do and that’s
where I get my information, but not all of them. I understand.
We’re all busy – who wants to write to their interview coach
when they’re done with interviewing? That’s why I can’t give
you percentages on how often my services work for my
clients.

I can tell you that if you work with me your interview skills will
be much improved. You’ll understand the Amazon interview
process and you’ll be prepared to answer their questions.

What will get you the best results is knowledge and practice.
I can give you enough knowledge and some practice, but
you’ll probably have to practice on your own as well if your
interview skills aren’t great when you come to me and
you’re on a deadline.

If someone tells you they can guarantee you results, they’re

just trying to get your money. I can help you and I will do my
best to make you the best interviewee you can be, but you
need you to work hard on your own as well.

The Secrets to Successful Behavioral Question

Answers
I get a lot of emails from people asking me to send them
“sample” answers they can use for their interviews.

If you read all the chapters in this book you should know
enough to write your own answers using your own successes
and failures. I will give you sample answers in each section,
which should help you create your own stories. If you go
through all the sections of the book and try to create your
own answers based on the questions, I talk about you will
end up with a portfolio of answers you can use to practice
for a successful interview.

I’m not going to write your answers for you because I can’t.
If you want to send me the answers you’ve written I can tell
you if they’re good and tell you what you need to do to
improve them, but I can’t write them for you because I don’t
know your job history.

Is This Book Right for You?

This book can be your guide if you’re thinking:

• I don’t know what behavioral questions are.

• I don’t know what behavioral questions I might get
asked in my Amazon interview.
• I don’t know what the Amazon leadership principles
are, and I don’t know how they’re used in interviews.
• I don’t know how to give answers to interview
questions that work well as answers for the Amazon
leadership principles.

How to Use the Book

Work your way through the chapters in order or read only
the ones you need, and you’ll be well equipped to stand
out from other applicants and get the offer you want.

The book should get you started and for some of you it will
be enough to prep for your interview. If you feel like you
want more help after you read the book, I’d be happy to
schedule an interview coaching session with you or answer
your questions over email. My email is
[email protected].

Let’s get started and get you ready.

Managing Interview Stress
If you’re reading this chapter, you’re probably feeling pre-
interview stress before your Amazon interview. Let’s go over
a few things that have helped my clients make it through
the Amazon interview process.

Interviews are hard for everyone, but Amazon interviews can

be very stressful because Amazon has a reputation for being
tougher in interviews than other companies.

Also, Amazon may be your dream company. If this is the

case for you, you may be nervous about interviewing there
because you’re putting extra pressure on yourself to get the
job.

How to Minimize Stress Before Your Interview

To combat stress, you must prepare for the interview. If you
feel prepared, your stress will be more manageable. If you
don’t prepare, your stress will just get worse. Fortunately, how
to prepare is not a mystery. Let’s review the steps to good
preparation.

There are so many posts on the internet about how to

prepare for an interview, and I don’t want to write another
one with the same advice. You know you need to get a
good night’s sleep, eat a good breakfast, etc. You don’t
need me to tell you those basic things. You came to this
book because you want to know about Amazon
specifically, so let’s focus on tips useful for Amazon
interviews.
Practice answers using Amazon’s preferred style
If you know you’ve got good answers, your stress will be
lower. If you don’t know what Amazon wants you to include
in your answers, keep reading this book.

Don’t wait until the last minute to start

You’d be amazed at the number of requests for coaching in
which the person tells me the interview is the next day! I
realize that sometimes you do get a request for an interview
that you can’t turn down and it’s in a day or two, which
doesn’t give you much time. However, I also get a lot of
clients who had time but didn’t use it wisely and now are
coming to me at the last minute.

Spend as much time as you can preparing

There is a colleague of mine who prepares clients for the
Harvard MBA program interview. He is the best MBA prep
coach in the business. He says that he won’t work with
people until they’ve already practiced 100 hours themselves
before they come to him. The people who are practicing
100 hours are your competition – not the exact same
people, but the type of person who is willing to do that. If
you haven’t done enough prep, you may lose the job to
someone who has put in that much time.

I love thinking of the MBA coach, because so many of my

clients think that one hour of prep will be enough. One hour
might be enough if you’re already a great interviewer, but
not otherwise.

The people who apply to Amazon are the world’s

overachievers. I understand these people very well because
I am the daughter of two, the sister of one, the wife of one,
and the friend of many. You can trust me when I say they
are definitely preparing every extra second they have.

Manage Stress During the Onsite Interview

Many interviews have onsite segments. The Amazon
interview is no different, in that usually you will have an onsite
interview after your preliminary phone interviews.

However, video interviews are increasingly common and

during Covid-19 Amazon has gone to video interviewing.

Whether it’s in person or on video, your onsite interview day

will be long.

Let’s look at a few things that can help you get through the
day.

Fly in earlier than necessary

If your interview is in person, fly in the day before and then
rest, so you’re not tired from traveling.

Prepare yourself mentally

The onsite interview is not like a normal day at the office. It
takes stamina and an ability to deal with stress. You’ll have
to present your story over and over and be as sharp and
focused at 4 PM as you were at 9 AM.

Are you mentally prepared for the experience?

Once you’ve prepared for the interview questions, you

should prepare yourself mentally for the day-long interview
experience, so you aren’t surprised by how tough it is.

Think about what parts of the day will be hard for you and
see if you can plan anything that might help you cope.
What about breaks?
You won’t get breaks between every interview if it’s onsite,
and they schedule video interviews back-to-back.

If you need a break, ask your interviewer. However, try to

avoid this if you can since it will waste their time.

Bring snacks
If you need to eat something (during breaks) to keep your
energy up, you can, but you should probably brush your
teeth afterward so you don’t have food in your teeth (and
speaking of this, I’m sure you brought your toothbrush to
brush after lunch, right?).

Plan for lunch

During your onsite interview, your lunch won’t be with an
interviewer, but it will be with someone who works at the
company. Although you technically aren’t being
interviewed during lunch, it is likely that your lunch
companion will talk about you with your interviewers. For this
reason, you should act professionally during lunch as well as
during the interviews.

Stand up
If your body isn’t going to be happy sitting down for hours at
a time, you can use the white board. There is probably one
in many of your interview rooms (but not all of them), and
you can use it to illustrate your points as you talk.

Using the whiteboard can be a nice break from sitting.

Obviously, you can’t do this with all of your questions, but for
some of them it will be perfectly normal to use the
whiteboard.
You’ll have to use your judgement about what answers
need to be written out on the board and which don’t. When
in doubt, ask if you can use it.

If your interview is on video, you’re out of luck with this one.

Make a strategy for dealing with difficult people

I hope that all of your interviewers are kind, relaxed people
who ask easy questions, but let’s imagine a scenario where
that isn’t the case.

One of my clients told me that he was being interviewed by

three people at the same time. One guy asked him a
question. He answered it, but the guy said, “No, that’s not
the right answer,” and then ignored him for the rest of the
hour.

That’s not an easy situation. How should you handle it?

My client got upset because he assumed the man didn’t like

him. Because he was upset, he didn’t answer the rest of the
questions well.

We don’t know what the interviewer actually thought of my

client. Yes, he didn’t like that one answer. But that doesn’t
mean he was planning to reject the man from the job.

My client assumed the worst, got upset, and ruined the rest
of his answers.

If he had answered the rest of the questions well, he might

have gotten the job.
What should you do if you have a difficult interviewer?
If you encounter a situation like this, an interviewer who
doesn’t react well to one of your answers, don’t panic. If you
panic, you’ll answer the rest of the questions badly.

Don’t assume that, because one of your answers isn’t

exactly right or even outright incorrect, you’ll get rejected.
You don’t have to be perfect to get the job. Most
interviewees don’t give perfect answers to every question.

What should you do if your interviewer says your answer is

wrong?
Stay calm and ask if they can explain what is incorrect.
Don’t just move on to the next question without asking them
to explain.

What should you do if your interviewer seems disinterested in

your answers?
If they aren’t paying attention to you, ask them how the
conversation is going. Most people will try to ignore the fact
that they aren’t paying attention, so if you stop and ask for
feedback it may cause them to pay attention. They may
also tell you that they have some problem with your answers,
in which case you can try to fix the problem. If you don’t ask,
you can’t fix the problem.

Plan for the worst possible situation so that you’ll be able to

handle anything without getting nervous.
Amazon Interview Process Basics
You may hear about the “Amazon interview process.” Yes,
there are some standardized features, but here’s the truth:
there are many different recruiters working for the company,
many departments that are hiring, and many job titles the
company is hiring for. The process one recruiter uses for one
job won’t necessarily be the same as the process one in
another department uses for a different job. Don’t expect
your process to be exactly the same as the process your
friend went through or the process you read about
somewhere.

However, even though the process doesn’t work exactly the

same every time, there are some similarities it’s useful to
understand. The overall process works like this:

1. Screening Interviews
Each candidate should expect at least one but
perhaps as many as four separate phone screenings.
These screenings are approximately forty-five minutes
each and not on the same day.
If you pass all of these screenings, you will be
scheduled for the on-site interview.
2. On-Site Interviews / The Loop
On-site interviews are also known as “The Loop.” The
number of people who’ll interview you for your onsite
depends on the level of job you’re applying for, but
you should expect to meet with four to eight people.
These meetings occur on the same day. With Covid-
19, the company has switched to video interviews on
Chime for this phase.
Screening Interviews
Let’s look at some of the most common questions related to
screening interviews that my clients ask me.

Who conducts the screening interviews?

The process usually starts with an internal recruiter or HR
manager, but hiring managers will sometimes make the first
call. The mix, and I say mix because there is sometimes just
one call but can be up to four, of people you should expect
to talk to is some combination of recruiter, HR manager,
hiring manager, and/or future colleague.

Are screening interviews difficult?

Don’t plan on the screens being any easier than the on-site
interviews.

The screening interviewers will ask much the same questions

as later interviewers – they won’t ask easier questions just
because they’re conducting a “screening” interview.

The interviewer may focus on going through your past

experience point by point, but they will also likely ask you a
mix of the other questions as well.

I advise you to take the screens as seriously as the other

interviews. After all, if you don’t do well with them, you won’t
go any further in the process.

People ask me this all the time, “But can’t I wait to prepare
until after I see how the screens go?” Sure, you definitely
can, but if you think you need interview prep then why
would you wait until after you’ve already started the
interviews? It makes no sense to do it this way. If you need to
prep, and you must if you’re reading this book, start before
the first screening interview.
On-Site / Loop Interviews
The Loop interviews are typically the next step in the process.

Who conducts the onsite/Loop interviews?

The Loop interviewers will be a mix of positions. Some of
them will be in jobs that are related to your position and
others will be from different departments. They’ll try to have
most of them be from jobs related to the position, because
these are the people who can best test you, but sometimes
people are busy so they can’t wait for the perfect line up.

Even if the interviewer won’t be your supervisor or colleague,

they’re still there to test you.

Be prepared for a mix of interviewers. If you’re a technical

person, you may have to talk to someone who isn’t as
technical or has different technical skills, so you want to be
mentally prepared for this. Be prepared to change your
language from technical to non-technical so that they can
understand you.

You may know the names of your Loop interviewers

beforehand, or the job titles, or only the number of people
you’ll be meeting. I know it’s annoying not to know the
names beforehand, but Amazon isn’t trying to confuse you
by withholding information. Sometimes people are busy or
schedules change and they may not be sure who’ll be able
to do the interview until the day before.

If they do give you the names, check them out on LinkedIn

and review their background. This preparation will help you
target your answers. It’s definitely okay to look them up on
LinkedIn – most candidates do this.
How do job levels fit in?
The number of people you’ll talk to is the same as the level
of job you’re applying for. Amazon has a job leveling system
that designates the salary and seniority of the job. L stands
for “level,” with L1 being the lowest and L12 the highest, Jeff
Bezos.

I assume if you’re applying for a job at Amazon you’re

already familiar with the levels, but I’m going to outline it
here because it will tell you how many people will be in your
loop interviews.

L1–L3 Hourly workers, part-timers, contractors

Salary: minimum wage to $50K USD

L4 Associates/Consultant
Full-time salaried position
$40–$90K

L5 Manager
$80–$150K

L6 Senior Manager
$120–$250K

L7 Senior Manager/Principal/Director
$300–$800K

L8 Director/GM
$300K–$1m

L9 There are actually none of these

L10 VPs
$1m +

L11 SVPs
$2m +

Most of my clients are going for jobs in levels 4 through11,

although I’ve worked with candidates for the lower levels as
well.

While Amazon doesn’t disclose the leveling of positions on its

website, if you don’t know the level of the job you’re
applying for, you can use the description above to make a
guess. Once you get an actual interview, you can ask the
recruiter or hiring manager what the level is.

If you know the level of job, you’ll know how many people
will be in your loop interviews. If it’s an L6, you’ll have six
people, and so on.

The “Bar Raiser”

Because the Amazon interview process is notorious and
there is information about it all over the internet, word of the
“bar raiser” has spread. Clients always ask me about it.

Who (or what) is the “bar raiser”?

The bar raiser is one of the interviewers in the loop interview.
They are not in the department you will be working in, which
means they aren’t in a hurry to hire someone. For this reason,
they are able to be more objective about the hiring process
than the other interviewers.

How will you know who the bar raiser is?

You might not know. Sometimes they tell you, but that isn’t
common.
How can you prepare for the bar raiser if you won’t know
who it is?
You prepare the same way that you do for the rest of the
interview.

Are there any clues who the bar raiser is?

The easiest way to find out who the bar raiser is to be told.
And sometimes you will be told. You can always ask the
recruiter as well if you think it would make you feel better to
know, but they may not know.

The bar raiser is usually someone who has interview

experience, meaning they’ve hired and retained
employees, so you can eliminate someone who started a
few months ago.

They won’t be in your department.

They’ll have probably been at the company at least 3+

years – they’re an experienced Amazonian.

They are also people who understand the leadership

principles deeply, and so understand the company culture.

They get specially trained to be the bar raiser, meaning they

get training on how to interview, and take the interview
process seriously.

What is the bar raiser’s task exactly?

They are checking your fit for the role and for the company.
They are supposed to give an outsider, unbiased
perspective on your abilities (department outsider). They are
also supposed to be evaluating your skills to see if you are
good enough to work at Amazon. Even though the other
interviewers are doing that too, the bar raiser is supposed to
have higher standards because they aren’t worried about
filling the job quickly (since they don’t work in the
department).

Will everyone have a bar raiser in their interview?

Bar raisers are used in interviews mostly for the corporate or
professional roles at Amazon, so if you’re applying for a job
in the warehouse or delivery services, for instance, you don’t
need to worry about this.

How do I prepare for the bar raiser?

As I said above, you prepare for it the same way you
prepare for the other interviewers.

If they ask you something difficult, answer it like you would

any other question. Above all, stay calm. They’re watching
how you react to stress as well as how you answer questions.

We haven’t talked about how to answer questions yet, but

the bar raiser is looking for the same things that the other
interviewers are in your answers.

My advice is to forget about the bar raiser. Just go into every

interview expecting tough questions and you won’t be
surprised. I believe that you should assume each and every
one of your interviewers is going to have an unpleasant
personality, a difficult accent to understand, and a list of
very hard questions to answer. Then you will prepare
accordingly and won’t be surprised if someone gives you a
tough time.

Stop wasting your time trying to figure out who the bar raiser
is going to be and spend your time practicing your answers.
People get really hung up on this bar raiser question. I get
the feeling they spend more time Googling “bar raiser” than
they do preparing. If you’re doing this too, instead of writing
your answers and practicing them, you’re wasting your time.

I know you’re worried about the bar raiser if you’ve done

some research on Amazon interviews, but when you’re
spending all your time worrying about this one piece of your
interview, you’re probably not preparing for every
interviewer to ask you tough questions. What if someone
who isn’t the bar raiser asks you hard questions? Will you be
prepared?

Bar raiser questions with examples

This is a trick section. There are no specific questions that the
bar raiser will ask you. They may focus on one or two
principles, but that is what the other interviewers will do too
because the interviewers divide them up.

People ask me all the time “What are the Bar Raiser
questions?” Other interview coaches write articles and make
videos about bar raiser questions. They just do this because
it’s a way to get you to read their blog or watch their video.
There are NO specific questions that the bar raiser asks. If
you read the other sections about the types of interview
questions, you will be preparing for the bar raiser as well. I
know I keep saying this over and over, but I keep seeing
more and more videos made with these titles.

Did you think there was a secret list of bar raiser questions?
There isn’t.

Lunch Buddy
Your onsite interviews will start in the morning and usually
continue until the afternoon, so they’ll give you time for
lunch. They’ll assign you someone to take you to lunch, and
this person is called your “lunch buddy.” Who will this person
be? Usually it’s one of the stakeholders for the job but it
won’t necessarily be.

Does this mean that you really don’t get a break during
lunch and that it’s actually part of the interview? Yes. The
lunch buddy will very likely give their notes to the hiring
committee the same as the other interviewers.

Lunch buddy etiquette

If the idea of having a lunch interview scares you, you’re not
alone. Many people, especially those whose English isn’t
perfect, are nervous when eating in professional situations. In
some ways being in an office in a structured interview is
easier than having a meal with a potential colleague.

Interviews over meals are usually a bit more casual and

unstructured than ones in the office. This means you’ll
probably be talking about unimportant or casual topics. If
this will be a problem for you, you can read my blog post for
some tips.

If you’re worried about knowing all the etiquette rules for

eating, like table manners, don’t worry about this. You don’t
need perfect manners. Just don’t chew with your mouth
open. That’s my personal pet peeve when dining with
someone.

Can I skip lunch?

I’ve had clients who told the recruiter that they needed
lunch to themselves to take a meeting, so you can do this,
but these people actually did have to take a meeting. If you
don’t have a meeting, this is a risky move.
Hiring Meeting
After the Loop is over, the interviewers get together in a
room and talk about you. It won’t be on the same day as
your interview but is usually in the same week, but for higher
level positions it can take longer to get everyone together.

They’re supposed to all agree whether or not to offer you

the job but sometimes they can’t. If that happens, they may
ask you back for another interview.

How Long Does the Process Take?

I’ve seen the whole process take three weeks and I’ve seen
it take three months. Usually the lower level jobs will move
faster but not necessarily.

I’ve also seen the job get put on hold after a number of the
interviews have been finished. I had one candidate who
went through two interview cycles and both jobs were put
on hold. He took it as a sign that he wasn’t meant to work at
Amazon and now he’s happily working somewhere else,
which I think is a positive way to deal with a frustrating
situation.

If You Don’t Get the Job

If you do well but aren’t a good fit for the role, they may ask
you to interview for another one. If you don’t do well, you
can’t interview at the company again for 6-12 months, but
after that you are free to interview again.

Taking Notes in the Interview

Many of your interviewers will have a laptop that they use to
take notes on your answers. They need the notes to write
their feedback doc about your candidacy.
This may be distracting for you. If you’re expecting to have a
conversation with your interviewer, don’t be upset if they
don’t really look at you because they’re typing. I don’t think
this would bother me very much, but some people don’t like
it.
Video Interviews
Do you have a video interview at Amazon coming up?

Video interviews, also called remote interviews, have been

gaining traction with companies over the last few years, and
Amazon is no exception to that. Especially with the
coronavirus crisis and local governments issuing stay-at-
home guidelines, most Amazon interviews are now
completely online via their video conferencing app,
Amazon Chime. Many of my clients are having to adjust to
this new way of interacting with the interview teams at
Amazon.

Here's what to expect and what you need to know to

succeed in remote interviews. I think it’s safe to say that,
even after the COVID-19 crisis has passed, video-based or
remote interviewing is here to stay because it’s cheaper and
easier for companies like Amazon than flying their
candidates to the office.

How to Have a Successful Chime Interview

I’ve had Chime for a while now because I work with so many
Amazon candidates and many of them have been asked to
use Chime for their interviews and want to test it out with me.
I already use Zoom, FaceTime, Hangouts, Skype, WhatsApp,
and probably more, and Chime is just an alternative to those
other applications. Each app brings its own set of quirks, and
since Chime is less common than those others, you should
set aside some time to learn the software in advance of your
remote interviews.

1. Practice with Chime

To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Chime in its current
state, and I’ve had some problems with it. For example, just
today, I couldn’t get my video to work. I suck at technology
and normally I wouldn’t dream of giving any tips in that
area, but because of the quick switch to video/remote
interviewing, a lot of candidates are testing out Chime for
the first time now and my clients are asking about it.

Installing Chime is easy. You’ll just need to download it from

the AWS site. Something that confused me is that there are
different tiers, Basic and Pro. When you install and activate
Chime on your computer, you enter into a thirty-day trial
period of the Pro version. After thirty days, the Chime app is
downgraded to the Basic version. You’ll find a complete list
of the differences between Basic and Pro on the pricing
page. The most important difference between the two for
me was that, with Basic, you can’t schedule video meetings
in advance. This missing feature probably won’t be an issue
for you if you’re just using Chime for your interview, but I
thought I would mention it. If you want to use Pro features
beyond the trial period, you’ll have to use an AWS account,
and it’s a confusing process.

Once you’ve got Chime running, try to practice using it with

a friend or family member in advance of your remote
interview. Be sure to practice on the same computer that
you’ll be using during your interview. Depending on your
operating system, you may need to grant permission to
Chime to use your camera, microphone, and so on.
Granting permission can lead to dialog boxes and playing
around in system settings – things you definitely don’t want
to be doing during the interview itself. Also, take the
opportunity to test and double check that Chime is using the
camera, speakers, and microphone that work best for your
set up.
Note You may be tempted to turn off your camera and
interview via audio only. While you can do that, I don’t
recommend it. Having the camera on and facing your
interviewer is a sign of respect and confidence. Don’t hide
from the camera!

Also, good connectivity is key. If you can, it’s really best to

access the internet via an ethernet cable instead of wifi. If
you don’t have an ethernet cable, try to sit in close proximity
to your wifi router, and ask your family or roommates to chill
with the Netflix streaming while you’re interviewing.

2. Sit in a quiet place

You really need a quiet space. Taking the video interview in
a crowded coffeeshop (not that there are any crowded
coffeeshops during the coronavirus crisis) is a really bad
idea. Your interviewer won’t be able to hear you, and it
could make for a frustrating experience for all parties
involved.

Turn off the TV. Turn off your phone. If you have your phone
set to ring on your computer, turn that off as well. Put all pets
and children out of the room. If there is loud traffic noise
outside of your house go somewhere else or sit away from
the window.

Don't make unnecessary noise that the microphone may

pick up on or amplify. This includes typing. Use a pen and
paper for notes.

You may consider muting your microphone when you’re not

talking, especially if there is background noise that you can’t
control. Just remember to unmute yourself when you start
talking.
3. Look your interviewer in the eyes
Once you’re familiar with Chime, you’ve got your computer
set up, and you’ve found a quiet place to take the
interview, you’re ready for action. So how about the
interview itself? My first piece of advice is to look in the
camera, and not at the video of your interviewer on the
screen. By looking at the camera, you’re looking in your
interviewer “in the eye” (but virtually).

If you’re not quite sure how to do that, let me give you an

example that might help. On the top of my monitor there
are two little circles – one lights up in red when the camera is
on, and the one to the left of the light is the actual camera. I
need to look at the camera or else it seems like I'm not
making eye contact with the person on the other side.

Your computer setup may be different than mine, so, as I

said above test it beforehand. Many of my clients never look
into my eyes because they look at my face on the screen
instead of at the camera. This is okay in a class with your
teacher, but it is not okay in an interview. Put a post it note
with an arrow by the camera to remind you.

4. Cheat
Here is the positive side of video interviewing – you can use
a cheat sheet, and no one will never know. My clients
frequently ask me if it’s okay to take notes into their onsite
interviews, and I say yes, it is okay as long as it’s one small
sheet of paper and you don’t look at it constantly.

I’m going to give the same advice for remote interviewing.

Tape some notes to the side of your monitor or put some in
front of you and glance down at them if you get stuck. Just
don’t overuse them - don’t constantly turn over sheets of
paper or stare away from the camera for too long while
reading your notes.

The video interview doesn’t mean you can read your

answers word for word, because it will be obvious if you do
that. But it’s a chance to have a small cheat sheet visible in
case you need quick reminders. Why wouldn’t you want to
take advantage of that?

5. Show a clean background

The problem with a remote interview is that you have to
worry about how you look but also how your office looks,
which is one extra thing to worry about. You know how you
pick out your interview outfit the night before and make sure
it’s clean and ironed? Now you need to plan your office
setting just as carefully. Look at the space behind you. What
do you see? The interviewer should see a clean, neat space.

You may think that I am old-fashioned or boring or too

focused on appearances and that since you’re good at
your job you don’t need to worry about these things. The
truth is we all judge people by their outward appearance in
the first second we see them, and this includes during a
video interview.

With these five steps out of the way, you can focus on what
really matters – proving to your interviewer how great you’d
be at the job.
The Amazon Behavioral Interview
In a previous chapter I told you that the Amazon interview
process is divided into screening and onsite interviews. This is
true, but what if you are told you’re having a “behavioral”
interview? Where does this fall in those categories? Truthfully,
a “behavioral interview” can fall into just about any
category:

• Phone interviews
• On-site interviews (which can be on video instead of
in-person)
• Technical interviews
• Non-technical interviews
• Screening interviews with the recruiter
• Screening interviews with the hiring manager
• Interviews that Amazon explicitly calls “behavioral
interviews”
Any and all of these types of interviews may have a
behavioral component.

Which Type of Interview Will Have Behavioral

Questions?
All the interviews, whether phone or onsite, technical,
screening, or behavioral, can have small talk,
basic/introductory questions, resume-related/functional
questions, and behavioral questions, and also technical
questions if it’s a technical job.

The lines between types of interviews aren’t as clear as they

make them out to be, and it can helpful to realize this, so
you aren’t surprised when you get asked a type of question
you weren’t expecting.

When Should I Prepare for Behavioral Questions?

Because each interview, whether phone or on-site, may be
a mix of question types, I advise you to prep for all types of
questions before the first interview, even before the first
interview with a recruiter. Recruiters and HR people often ask
a few behavioral questions in the first interview.

Don’t wait to prepare your stories for behavioral interviews

until after the phone interviews are over because you think
you’ll need them only during the on-site interview.

Will They Really Ask Me Behavioral Questions in the

Screening Interview?
Sometimes they do, yes.

Will They Really Ask Me Basic Questions in the

Behavioral Interview?
Sometimes the interviewer uses what I think of as normal
interview style, which is to start with some small talk and then
with the “Tell me about yourself” type intro questions, but
some interviewers jump immediately into the behavioral
questions with no preliminaries.
Amazon Written Interview Question
Candidates for many of the jobs at Amazon, those Level 5
and above, receive a writing exercise that’s due before their
onsite interview. Amazon gives this test because candidates
need good writing skills to work there.

I started out my career as an editor and then I was an

English teacher, so I do a lot of work with my clients on their
written exercises.

What Topic Will the Amazon Written Interview

Question Cover?
The writing exercise gives you the option of answering one of
two questions, and they’re the same two questions for
everyone:

Written interview question option one

What is the most inventive or innovative thing you
have done? Describe something that was your idea,
e.g., a process change, a product idea, a new
metric, or a novel customer interface. It does not
need to be something that is patented. Do not write
about anything your current or previous employer
would deem confidential information. Provide
relevant context for us to understand the
invention/innovation. What problem were you
seeking to solve, and what was the result? Why was it
an important problem to solve? How did it make a
difference to the business or organization?

Written interview question option two

Most decisions are made with analysis, but some are
judgment calls not susceptible to analysis due to time
or information constraints. Please write about a
judgment call you’ve made recently that couldn’t be
analyzed. It can be a big or small one, but should
focus on a business issue. What was the situation, the
alternatives you considered and evaluated, and your
decision-making process? Be sure to explain why you
chose the alternative you did relative to others
considered.

When Is the Amazon Written Interview Question

Due?
You have until forty-eight hours before your interview to
submit your written exercise.

How Long Should the Answer to the Amazon Writing

Exercise Be?
They say four pages, but you shouldn’t go beyond two and
a half pages.

Essay Basics
Other things you need to know before you start writing:

• Use MS Word (rich text format).

• Copy in the question you’re answering at the top of
the document.
• Single space the lines.
• What font to use? Use something easy to read. Some
people like Times New Roman 12 point, but I
personally prefer Arial 12 point. This exercise is business
writing, so keep it simple.
• Don’t use bullets.
• Don’t use outline format.
• Don’t include proprietary information.

How Is the Amazon Written Exercise Related to the

Behavioral Questions?
If you’ve already been working on your answers to the
behavioral questions, you may have noticed that the two
written interview questions are both behavioral interview
questions. These questions are asking you to tell a story
about your past professional experience, like you would
have to do in your interview in answer to a behavioral
question.

Because the written question is a behavioral question, you

can use the same information and structure that you’d use
to answer the oral behavioral questions.

Amazon Writing Sample Answer Structure

Once you’ve chosen a topic for your writing sample, use the
following format to answer it. Note that it follows almost the
same structure you’d use to answer an oral behavioral
question but has an added introductory paragraph before
the PAR sections and a conclusion paragraph at the end.

Paragraph 1 – introduction
This paragraph should include an introduction to the topic
and a summary of what you’re going to write about. Also,
you should provide a brief answer to the question – state
explicitly the innovation or judgement call that you made.

Problem section
• Corresponds to the P section (Problem) of the PAR
structure – what is the background and the problem
you were trying to solve?
• Can be more than one paragraph but not more than
half a page.

Action section
• Corresponds to the A section (Action) of the PAR
structure.
• Should typically be the longest section.
• Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence that
identifies the main idea or ideas that will be discussed
in this paragraph. Are you talking about a lot of ideas
in one paragraph? What’s the summary of them? Use
this as your topic sentence.
• Must say how you solved the problem you mentioned
in the first paragraph.

Results section
• Corresponds to the R section (Results) of the PAR
structure.
• What is the outcome of your judgement call or
innovative idea?

Last paragraph – conclusion

• Restate topic.
• Summarize the main points you’ve covered.

Did You Answer the Question?

Make sure you answer the question. If you’ve chosen the
innovation question, make sure to say why whatever you did
was innovative. How was it new? Why did it matter to the
client or the business? If you chose judgement call, you
need to explain why what you did required using your
judgement. Often I will read an entire exercise and still not
be clear on what the actual answer to the question is, i.e.,
what the innovation or the judgement call was. I know it’s
easy to get off track when you’re writing, but your number
one goal is to answer the question.

Does My Writing Need to Be Perfect?

This isn’t English class in tenth grade where you had to write
an essay with a five-paragraph structure and perfect syntax
and grammar. Your language doesn’t have to be perfect. If
your English is above average or average, you should be
fine. If your English is below average, you can still get the job
(unless clear writing is a crucial component of the job like in
PR), but you may be asked to take a writing class once you
start working there. They want to make sure your emails and
reports are good enough for your colleagues to understand
you.

Does this sound like I’m not being strict enough? I used to be
an English teacher, so I actually have pretty strong opinions
about language. However, I’ve also worked in corporate
America enough to know that, the truth is, unless you’re in
marketing, PR, or a senior executive, your language doesn’t
need to be absolutely perfect, including your written
language.

The important thing is to use the PAR structure to keep your

answer organized and clear and use the best English you
can. Don’t obsess about your spelling and grammar. You
want to think about the question like a behavioral question.
Does your answer make sense? Did you say too much? Too
little? Are you actually answering the question?
Language Tips
In addition to what I said in the previous paragraph, your key
goals language-wise should be to keep your sentences short
and clear and to replace adjectives or other filler words with
data.

How short is short enough? By “short,” I mean your sentences

should have 30 words or fewer.

One way you can do that is to eliminate any overly long

words or phrases. What are those?

Overly long Better

Due to the fact that Because
Lacked the ability to Couldn’t
For the purpose of For
Utilized Used
Until such time as Until
With the possible exception of Except

You should also replace adjectives with data because

adjectives are imprecise.

Lacking data With data

We reduced server side
We made the performance
tp90 latency from 10 ms to 1
much faster.
ms.
Nearly all customers 92% of Bonus-club members
Significantly better Up 34 bonus points
Unit sales increased by 40%
Sales increased significantly in Q4 2019, compared to
in Q4. Q4 2018, because of
holiday promotions.
Sample Answers
I’ve worked with many Amazon candidates on their writing
samples, and I wish I could share with you some of the best
answers I’ve seen. However, because Amazon candidates
aren’t supposed to ask for help on their written exercises, I
may get someone in trouble if I provide real examples. The
examples that follow aren’t real, but they’re inspired by real
answers from my clients, many of whom ended up getting
the job.

Let’s look at some common mistakes that I see in examples

and discuss how we might avoid those mistakes in your
answers.

Mistake #1 – Failing to add an introductory paragraph

I understand that it may seem tempting to follow the PAR
structure and just jump right in with an explanation of the
problem. However, your answer will be stronger if you take
the time to include an introduction.

A common mistake that inexperienced writers make is that

they “bury the lede.” Maybe you’ve heard this phrase
before. It means that the writer fails to state up front the
most important part of the story. When a writer “buries the
lede,” the reader has to put in more effort to discern the
main point of the story. Your introduction is an opportunity to
orient the reader (your interviewer). What’s important about
your story? What’s the main point?

Let’s look at an example. Notice how straightforward and to

the point this writer is in the first paragraph:

“I recently had to make a very difficult judgement call

about whether to release code to production that had not
been tested with our typical rigor. I took a shortcut, and to
be honest, I hacked together a solution so quickly I surprised
even myself. But in my gut, I knew it would fix the problem, so
I made the judgement call to deploy the code. Let me walk
you the problem, my thought process into the actions I took,
and the results.”

With the introductory paragraph in place, the writer can

transition into the PAR structure for the rest of the essay.

Mistake #2 – Failing to provide context

Here is an example of the situation/problem step from the
written exercise innovation question:

“A few months ago, I took part in a company meeting

about an internal product, which I was using for consulting
services. I was a user of the product, but I didn’t have any
formal role in this team and I had little knowledge of its inner
workings.

The discussion at the meeting was about how to properly roll

out the product to the customers. The tech lead proposal
was to release it as a downloadable and runnable
application with a license server in the cloud. As I listened in
on the team’s conversation, they went into detail about
installation instructions and how to implement the licensing
process.

I didn’t like their plan. It seemed difficult for the customer in

his buyer journey with potential issues on installation,
monitoring, and debugging while simultaneously introducing
new customer support issues. Also, with this approach, we
were losing opportunities to scale and provide valuable
services to our customers.”

My comments on this problem section:

There are some things that could be done better here. First
of all, there is no background. Where was he working? What
was his role? What is the internal product? Also, why was he
in the meeting if he wasn’t on the team?

For the problem section to work well, you must provide clear
context. Anticipate and attempt to address questions that
your reader may have about this situation. To address the
question of why he was in the meeting, he could have
simply added, “While I wasn’t on the team, I was a
stakeholder on the project and was included in the launch
plan discussions.” You want to try to paint a picture of the
situation for your reader.

Let’s rewrite the beginning of that problem section in a way

that provides clearer context and helps the reader really see
that problem from your unique point of view:

“A few months ago, I was asked to provide input on an

update to one of our existing product lines. While I had no
formal role on the product team, they were soliciting my
input because, as an account executive, I sold the existing
product as a part of our professional services package…”

Note that it doesn’t take much to provide context. The rest

of the story makes much more sense now that we know this
person’s role and why he was being asked to give
feedback.

Here is another example of the situation/problem step from

the written exercise judgement call question:

“One of my business mentors, whose opinion I value deeply,

once suggested that I spend more time and a bigger
budget to increase my conference and workshop
attendance to enhance and diversify my pipeline of
projects. As a self-employed consultant with a long project
cycle from origination through execution to closing and
billing, I couldn’t neglect business development efforts, in
particular with high-level participants. Many high-level
people cannot be accessed easily, even if you come up
with a referral.”

My comments on this answer:

Her way of presenting this is pretty generalized and not

specific to what her situation is – what is her business? How
many clients does she have? Why are conferences the
answer to this problem?

Just as in the previous example, this example fails to set

proper context and doesn’t anticipate the readers’
questions. How can we revise this example to provide
context? In your own answers, give some details that will
draw the reader in. Don’t just speak in generalities.

Here’s my attempt at a revised version of the same

“situation/problem”:

“At my previous job, I was struggling to build and maintain a

healthy, diverse pipeline of projects. I had tried a few things
to address the issue, but I wasn’t gaining traction, so I went
to one of my business mentors for advice. He told me that I
wasn’t using my budget wisely and that I should actually be
spending more, specifically on building a pipeline by
attending more conferences and workshops. I had thought
that I was doing the right thing by keeping costs low. He
helped me see, for high-level biz dev, sometimes you need
to spend money to make money.
While using more of my budget made me uncomfortable, I
pushed myself to take his advice. I built out a three-month
conference schedule for me and my team, and we
targeted companies and individuals that would diversify our
pipeline. The approach was successful and created a
model for how we built pipelines across a number of teams.”

Mistake #3 – Giving too much background

Giving too much background is the opposite of Mistake #2,
Failing to Provide Context. Providing too much context is just
as bad as providing none. In both cases, you’re failing to tell
your story in an effective manner. Ask yourself, “If I were
reading this story for the first time, what is the minimum
amount of information I would need in order for it to make
sense?”

If you find yourself wanting to provide a lot of background

information, go ahead and write it all, but after you’re done,
try to edit it down to the bare essentials. If you’re still
struggling, ask for help. There’s no shame in asking a trusted
friend or family member for help in finding the balance
between providing no context and too much background.

Mistake #4 – Failing to detail your “Action”

As I wrote above, the action section is the most important
section. The Action section is your place to shine. You must
describe what action you took to address the problem.

Here is an example of an action step from the innovation

question:

“I contacted each carrier to re-sign the contract with a new

billing cycle and set up the account management portals to
enable the report downloading features. Then I summarized
the cost analysis table (cost, usage for each device, fleet,
and carrier weight) and had a weekly meeting with the
DevOps team to fine-tune the load-balancing algorithms to
improve the cost. Finally, I worked with the customer support
team to monitor complaint ticket counts to ensure no
impact on customer experiences. We enacted a throttle
policy adjustment weekly to balance between the overage
and user experience. I also adjusted the carrier’s data plan
to ensure balance of demand and supply based on the
device usage trend.”

My comments:

While this section is a bit short (could she go through the

steps in more detail?), I like that she gives herself credit for
the actions she took. So often I see candidates write “we did
this” and “my team did that.” This section is about actions
that you personally took to effect change and fix the
problem. It’s not a time to talk about your team.

However, as I mentioned, I recommend that this candidate

build out the section further. For example, how did she work
with the customer support team? What did she do? Did she
meet with them? How did she monitor the case count?

To decide which details to dwell on in the action section,

consider the job opportunity. Before you write this section,
take the time to reread the job description. What qualities or
skills are emphasized in the job description? If you can show
examples of how your “action” matches the qualities or skills
covered in the job description (without actually alluding to
the job description), that’s where you want to give the most
detail.
Mistake #5 – Failing to describe impact
So you’ve set up your story with a short introduction, you’ve
provided just the right amount of context in the problem
section, and you’ve detailed the steps you took to address
the problem in the Action section. You’re done, right?

Wrong. You must describe the impact that your action had
and be specific. Data is your most important ally in this
section. How specifically did your action impact the
business? Did you solve an important customer problem?
Great, how much new revenue did that create? Did you
improve or invent a technical process? Great, what were
the proportional improvements in throughput? State the
impact.

Here’s an example of a Results section from the writing

sample innovation question:

“I presented the document to the Finance Director, and he

did not have any change requests and approved it to be
used as is. He then shared it with multiple teams in the
company. The recruiting team used it to plan hiring for
upcoming new site launches as it provided job titles, head
counts, and contractual maximum labor costs that they
could reference. The accounting team used it to audit the
payroll file to ensure labor cost billing and head counts were
within contractual limit and any errors in the payroll system to
be corrected as a result. The finance team used it for
budget planning and to work closely with accounting and
operation teams to plan any future financial needs of the
company. It helped the operations team plan ahead to
pursue change orders to support business change and
growth and follow up on any pending contracts that were
not signed by the client yet. This document is still being used
to track the contract information and status as of today.”

Comments on this answer:

In general, this answer is a very good Results section. It has

great detail and describes the long-term impact on the
business. How could we improve it? The answer, almost
always, is to add some data. For example, in this case, the
candidate could add how much time or person hours this
new document saved, and he could even take it further
and attach a dollar amount to the time savings.

Here is another example of a Results section:

“At the conclusion of the pilot period, I met with the VP and
we agreed that it was too risky for us to consolidate our
desktop infrastructure with a VDI vendor. I directed my team
to roll back the changes, and we did so in less than two
weeks.

While this may have appeared to be a failure, I saw this

experience as a great success for me, my team, and the
company. We moved quickly to evaluate a modern solution
and gathered empirical evidence in our environment. We
took a calculated risk and were able to reverse the decision
when we had the information needed to make a better
decision, and we were able to validate some assumptions
that have proven valuable in other ways. Through this
exercise, we found that VDI is a viable solution for WFH users,
and we’ve rolled out a recently developed WFH program
leveraging VDI technology.”

Comments on this answer:

I found this Results section very interesting because she
described how failure leads to impact on the business. She
turned the failure into a “lessons learned” section, which is
good. You don’t have to do this but in a situation like this
one, where something wasn’t successful, adding some
detail about what you learned can add an extra layer of
insight. My one piece of advice for this candidate was, as
you can probably guess, to add some data or business
metrics. For her, it was easy to add that information because
the program that she described brought the company six
figures in new revenue. By adding that last detail, she
showed the true results of her actions.
Behavioral Interview Basics
Do you know what behavioral interview questions are?
They're the type of questions that start with something like,
“Give me an example of...” or “Tell me about a time....” or
“Describe an occasion when….” or “Outline a situation
when….”

A popular behavioral question is, “Give me an example of

when you had to deal with a difficult customer.”

How Do I Know It’s a Behavioral Question?

A behavioral question often starts with “Tell me about a
time…” or “Give me an example of…” or “When did you....”
If you see one of these openings you have a behavioral
question (also called STAR questions). Usually people don’t
have problems recognizing that these are behavioral
questions because the question words themselves are asking
for a story.

“How” Questions Are Behavioral Questions

But what if you get asked “How do you manage
employees?” or “What is your management style?” What
about “Have you ever managed employees?” Most people
miss that these are also behavioral questions. Even though
they aren’t asking for a story or example, the interviewer is
expecting a story in the answer and so these are behavioral
questions.

I know these questions don’t sound like they’re asking for an

example, but you need to give one. A general answer (one
without a story) isn’t necessarily wrong but your answer will
be much stronger if you say the general stuff and then add
a specific example.
For example, you can say “I try to listen to what my
employees are really saying, and this usually helps me advise
them. An example of when that worked is…” In other words,
use a general answer (the first sentence) and then a specific
story.

You never want to just give the general part of your answer
because it will make your answer weaker than it could be.
The point of the stories is to show you know something. You
can say you know something, but a story will use the words
to paint a picture of your experience.

Even if you’re not absolutely sure you’re being asked a

behavioral question you should answer with general stuff
and specific example, because it will make your answer
stronger.

Why Do Interviewers Use Behavioral Questions?

Many people don’t understand why they have to answer
this type of question in their interview.

Interviewers use behavioral questions because they think

that if candidates describe specific, job-related situations
that happened in the past, the interviewer will get a clearer
picture of the candidate’s past behavior. Why do they care
about past behavior? Because interviewers believe past
behavior accurately predicts future performance. That’s one
reason these story questions are popular.

Is that true, does past behavior predict future performance?

Well, that’s a good question. I’m not sure that I’ll do exactly
the same thing in the future that I’ve done in the past. But
that’s one theory behind asking these questions.
Another reason interviewers ask behavioral questions is that
interviewers believe behavioral answers show how the
interviewee’s mind works, how they solve problems, what
they’re passionate about, what they want to do, and so on.
Interviewers believe that answers are a way for candidates
to “think out loud” – a way to hear their thought process and
the reasons they do something.

This I can believe. I do think the way we tell stories gives

clues about us and about how we think.

Another reason interviewers ask behavioral questions is that

hearing stories about a candidate’s past jobs is a good way
to judge their experience. I think this is the reason that makes
the most sense to me. If I wanted to know if you knew how
to do X, I’d ask you if you had done X in the past and then
listen to your answer to judge how much you really knew
about X.

Who Should Prepare for Behavioral Questions?

Everyone should prepare for behavioral interview questions,
even if you’re applying for a technical role.

Don’t assume you'll only get asked behavioral questions if

you're applying for a role with managerial responsibilities.
Amazon asks behavioral questions to candidates even if the
job they’re applying for is something that requires only sitting
at a computer and talking to no one all day.

For example, I just heard from a client who was applying for
a Network Engineering job at Amazon, and he told me that
they only asked him technical questions (so he was happy).
But I've also heard the opposite. I had a client who was also
applying for a technical job there, and he said that his
second phone interview (after the first short one with HR)
was 1.5 hours of detailed behavioral questions, where they
asked him the question and then asked for further details
after he'd given his answer.

So you can see that it definitely pays to prepare for

behavioral questions, even if the job you’re applying for is
technical.

Introduction to the Amazon Leadership Principles

The Amazon leadership principles are fourteen ideas or
values that are the backbone of the company. They are
“the specific characteristics necessary for successful
leadership at Amazon.”

Most companies have “mission statements” but in my

experience they don’t take them too seriously. They’re
mentioned once in a while in the company marketing
material but don’t get used other than that.

At Amazon, these fourteen ideas are taken very seriously,

not just by the senior executives but by all levels of
employees.

Why are the principles important?

So why is it important for you to know the principles as you’re
preparing for your interview?

The Amazon leadership principles have actually become

the Amazon culture, or maybe they were the culture to
begin with. During the interview, they’re looking for whether
you’re a good culture fit, and since the culture is the same
as the principles, you’ll need to show how you fit in with
those ideas.
If you want to know more about the history of the principles
and how they became so important, you should read The
Amazon Way by John Rossman. It’s a great book that goes
in depth about the culture and the principles.

There are also countless articles online about the history of

Amazon and the principles. If you’re excited about working
for Amazon, you’ve likely read quite a bit about the
principles already, so I’m not going to say much more about
the history of them here.

All you need to know is that the principles are very important
to the culture, so you must understand them before you
interview.

How the leadership principles are used in interviews

During the interview you’ll be judged on how well you fit into
the Amazon culture. In other words, you’ll be judged on
whether you are the kind of person who “lives” the
principles.

Your job in the interview is to show you are the kind of

person who will live the principles.

I cannot emphasize this enough, so I’ll say it again.

Your job in the interview is to show that you fit into the
Amazon culture. You have to show that you embody the
principles, live by the principles, and are aligned with the
principles.

The big reason Amazon interviews are so challenging is that

you must convincingly demonstrate that you embrace the
principles, in addition to all the other normal interview stuff.
How do I pass the principles test?
In order to show you are the right kind of person for Amazon,
the person who lives the principles, you have to do a few
things:

1. Read and understand the principles.

2. Memorize them, just in case they ask you which one is
your favorite (a common interview question) or which
are your favorites.
3. Decide which principles are relevant to the job you
want (for instance, if you’re not going to be hiring
people, you probably don’t have to worry about the
“hire” principle). I cover this topic in more detail
earlier in a later chapter.
4. Plan stories about your past experience that illustrate
each principle relevant to your job. We’ll talk more
about this later.

How will you be asked about the principles?

You could be asked directly about the principles or they
could be mentioned indirectly. For instance, you could get a
question like “What is your favorite principle” or “How have
you shown customer obsession” or “Tell me about a time you
worked with a difficult customer.” You can also be asked
something that doesn’t seem like it’s about a principle but
actually is, like “Give me an example of a time you had to
communicate cross-functionally.”

The principles are the basis for behavioral questions

I put information about the leadership principles into the
section about the basics of behavioral questions because
the behavioral questions are where you’re going to
encounter the leadership principles. We’ll talk more about
this in greater detail later in the book.

The Fourteen Principles

You can find these principles on the Amazon jobs website,
but I include them here for your convenience.

1. Customer Obsession
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards.
They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust.
Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they
obsess over customers.
2. Ownership
Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t
sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They
act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just
their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”
3. Invent and Simplify
Leaders expect and require innovation and invention
from their teams and always find ways to simplify.
They are externally aware, look for new ideas from
everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented
here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may
be misunderstood for long periods of time.
4. Are Right, A Lot
Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment
and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives
and work to disconfirm their beliefs.
5. Learn and Be Curious
Leaders are never done learning and always seek to
improve themselves. They are curious about new
possibilities and act to explore them.
6. Hire and Develop the Best
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire
and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent,
and willingly move them throughout the organization.
Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role
in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people
to invent mechanisms for development like Career
Choice.
7. Insist on the Highest Standards
Leaders have relentlessly high standards – many
people may think these standards are unreasonably
high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and
driving their teams to deliver high quality products,
services and processes. Leaders ensure that defects
do not get sent down the line and that problems are
fixed so they stay fixed.
8. Think Big
Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders
create and communicate a bold direction that
inspires results. They think differently and look around
corners for ways to serve customers.
9. Bias for Action
Speed matters in business. Many decisions and
actions are reversible and do not need extensive
study. We value calculated risk taking.
10. Frugality
Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed
resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There
are no extra points for growing headcount, budget
size, or fixed expense.
11. Earn Trust
Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat
others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even
when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders
do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells
of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their
teams against the best.
12. Dive Deep
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the
details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when
metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath
them.
13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge
decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is
uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have
conviction and are tenacious. They do not
compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a
decision is determined, they commit wholly.
14. Deliver Results
Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and
deliver them with the right quality and in a timely
fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion
and never settle.
Preparing for Your Interview

Predicting the Interview Questions

How will you know what questions you’ll get asked?

The biggest thing that scares interviewees about their

interviews is not knowing what questions to expect. Everyone
is afraid that they’ll be in an interview and not have an
answer prepared for one of the questions.

There are so many potential interview questions you could

be asked. How can you possibly know which ones to
prepare for? This big unknown factor is part of what’s
making you so nervous.

The first step in interview preparation is making a list of what

questions you’ll be asked. How you can do that since the
interviewer isn’t going to tell you ahead of time?

It’s actually pretty easy to predict the questions you’ll be

asked, and I’m going to explain it to you. If you use this
method, you still might get some questions you haven’t
prepared for, but there shouldn’t be too many surprises.

So how do you anticipate the questions you’ll be asked?

How to Find Out What Question Topics You’ll Get

Use the job title

The first way to find clues as to what questions they’ll ask you
is to look at the job title. The job title, and what you know
about the job responsibilities for that job, will give you an
idea of the themes of the questions and many of the exact
questions.
For example, if you're applying for a managerial job, like
Engineering Manager, the questions will ask things like, "Tell
me about a time when you had to give someone feedback
on their performance" or "Give me an example of when you
mentored someone." I don’t need to see the exact job
description to predict these because I know that giving
performance feedback and mentoring are two things that
managers need to do. This doesn’t mean you won’t be
asked questions about other topics too, but you’ll definitely
be asked about hiring, managing performance, developing
careers, and so on, because these are core skills for
managers.

You know that the Engineering Manager candidates will also

get questions about the technical side of their role too,
because technical knowledge is part of what it takes to be
qualified for this job. They’ll have to work with other
engineering teams toward larger engineering goals and
hold their team accountable, review and select technical
vendors, set standards for best practices around coding,
and/or set mechanics for how code is deployed.

When you think about the job title for the job you want,
what do you know about it that might suggest topics for
you? If you’re applying for the job, you must have a pretty
good idea of what skills it requires. These are the types of
things interviewers might ask you about. Use what’s already
in your brain about the job to predict topics.

Analyze the job description

The second way to find clues about the questions you might
get asked is to go one step further and look past the job title
to job description itself. Generally, job descriptions have four
parts:
1. The Overview
This section will tell you the basic role you’ll be doing.
For example, here is the overview from a job
description for an IT Sales Lead Development
Representative:
“You’ll be an important member of the sales
organization, qualifying leads, profiling customers,
and providing input on which sales campaigns
generate the best leads. The objective is to identify
and create qualified opportunities for the Education
vertical, working in collaboration with your global
peers, marketing, account managers and the partner
channel.”
So this overview is giving you clues about potential
questions. Every point in it could be a question. For
instance, they could ask you about “When have you
provided input on sales campaigns” or “What is your
experience qualifying leads?”
2. The Role and Responsibilities
You should read this part of the description very
carefully. This section is where the everyday duties of
the job are described. This is where you’ll find your
biggest clues about what kinds of things the
interviewer will be asking.
For instance, this section might say that “You will run
teams in an Agile or Scrum environment.” If this is the
case, then one of the behavioral questions you might
get asked is “Tell me about a time you were in charge
of a team that was working in Agile.”
If this section lists “Update and maintain customer
information within Salesforce” you may get a
behavioral question about when you did this.
3. The Qualifications
If the role is IT Manager, one of the qualifications may
be a Bachelor’s in Computer Science. If you do have
this degree, be prepared to discuss it. If you don’t
have the degree, prepare a reason that you can do
the job without it.
4. The Wish List or Desired Attributes
Most job descriptions include a wish list of skills that
aren’t necessarily required but are useful. If you do
have any of these, be sure to add them to your stories
so it’s clear that you bring something extra.

Use more than one job description

Sometimes the job descriptions are very short, and you can
tell the company didn’t spend much time writing it. In that
case I usually search for several job descriptions – not
necessarily from the same company – and then combine
the info from them into one long list of requirements/skills.

Doing this will at least give you more to go on than a short

badly written job description.

If you combine what you know about the job title with what
you can see from one or more job descriptions, you should
have a good list of questions to prepare for. I advise you to
go through the job description and turn each bullet (and
even the sentences that are written in paragraph format,
usually at the beginning of the job description) into a
question and then write a story for them.
Use the industry
What industry are you in? This will also give you an idea of
what questions you’ll be asked. If you’re a product designer,
for example, it’s reasonable to expect you may get asked
your opinions about current trends in product design such as
design systems, design research, UX vs UI, or about your
favorite tools.

Prepare for questions about your resume

Is there anything on your resume that is difficult to explain?
Are you not working now? Is there a gap between jobs? Are
you switching fields? You can be sure they’ll ask about those
points so prepare good answers for them.

Question Topics by Seniority Level

I’ve previously talked about how to predict the questions
you might get asked in your interview. There’s another point
to focus on when predicting questions: interview question
topics (and the leadership principles related to them) will
change as you go up in your career level.

Whether you’re in finance like in the example I’m going to

use here or in some other field the lower level jobs are usually
more focused on collecting data and reporting on it or
doing something technical than the higher level jobs, which
are more focused on managing teams, strategy, and the
big picture. Knowing this can help you know where to focus
your preparation efforts. If you know you’re applying for a
lower level job, you should start by creating stories for the
principles you’ll probably be asked about first.

A job like Senior Financial Analyst should focus on:

• Diving into the data/doing research. What does the
data tell you? The “Dive Deep” principle.
• Your ability to take action. Can you act quickly versus
getting stuck in analysis paralysis waiting for someone
else to make a decision? The “Bias for Action”
principle.
• Quality. Are your deliverables excellent? The “High
Standards” principle.
A job like Finance Manager (a level up from Senior Financial
Analyst) should focus on:

• Judgement. Do you know how to make good

decisions? The “Are Right, A Lot” principle.
• Can you work with other people successfully? Are you
an indirect influencer on other lines? Do you
communicate well? The “Have Backbone” and “Are
Right, A Lot” principles.
• Are you innovative? Do you look for new and better
ways of doing things? The “Invent and Simplify”
principle.
• Do you know how to build to scale and simplify
process? “Invent and Simplify.”
These skills focus on the bigger picture more than just looking
at the data for one project.

A job one more level up like Senior Finance Manager should

focus on:

• Hiring and developing talent. The “Hire and Develop”

principle.
• Do you know how to speak up if you see the wrong
decision being made? The “Have Backbone”
principle.
• Looking at the big picture and seeing how pieces fit
together and making long-term plans. The “Think Big”
principle.
At a higher level you should also be able to answer
questions about the concepts from the lower level jobs too.
Just because you’ve moved up a level doesn’t mean you
can forget what you used to know. Although you may not
be doing those tasks anymore, the people you’re managing
probably are and you’ll still need to be able to judge their
work.

Questions Specifically for Leaders and Managers

Throughout this book, I’ve discussed the importance of
understanding the leadership principles, and the ways in
which you need to account for them while preparing for
your interview at Amazon. In this chapter, I’m going to
explain in more depth what I touched on in the last section,
“Questions by Seniority Level.” Just like everyone else,
candidates applying for manager or leadership roles get
asked about the leadership principles. However, questions
about management roles tend to take a different shape,
and you need to prepare accordingly.

Let’s look at some behavioral questions that involve

leadership areas of concern such as forming and executing
a strategy, building and managing teams, delegating
effectively, and so on. As usual, we’ll view these questions
through the lens of the leadership principles.
Hire and Develop the Best
The first of these groups of questions are those that fall under
the “Hire and Develop the Best” leadership principle. You
don’t need to hire or promote or give feedback to people if
you’re an individual contributor, but if you move into a
manager role, you need to be able to talk about your skills in
these areas, so prepare answers for these questions.

Here are some examples of “Hire and Develop” questions for

a job with managerial responsibilities:

• What is your management style? Why would anyone

want to work for you?
• Tell me about your hiring process when you are hiring
key positions such as direct reports. Where do you go
for talent? What resources do you employ? What are
the steps in the process? What traits do you seek that
will tell you the candidate will be successful on the
team apart from the obvious hard skills?
• Tell me about someone that you hired that you
thought was better than you in a number of
areas. How did you add value to that person’s growth
and development?
• Tell me about a time when you had a low-performing
individual on your team. How did you deliver
feedback to this person? Did their performance
improve, or did they leave the organization?
• How do you coach an employee in completing a
new assignment?
• Give me an example of someone who was promoted
one or two levels up in the organization – not just
because they were a star who would naturally rise,
but due to your development/coaching efforts.
• How do you make sure your team is diverse?
• How do you get subordinates to produce at a high
level? Give an example.
• Describe a time when you had to decide whether or
not to award or ask for additional resources. What
criteria did you use for making the call?
• Tell me about a time when you were able to remove
a serious roadblock preventing your team from
making progress.

Are Right, A Lot

The leadership principle “Are Right, A Lot” is about making
decisions. Everyone needs to make decisions at work, but
management decisions tend to have a larger impact and
can affect more people and the lines of business for which
they are responsible. Here are some examples of “Are Right,
A Lot” questions for a job with managerial responsibilities:

• How do you use data to influence decision making?

• Tell me about a business model decision or key
technology decision or other important strategic
decision you had to make for which there was not
enough data or benchmarks. In the absence of all
the data, what guided your choice and how did you
make the call?
• What are the top strategic issues you’ve had to face
in your current role? What decisions did you end up
making?
Bias for Action
“Bias for Action” is about how you move from planning into
action. An individual contributor does have to act, but a
manager will have to get other people (a team) to act.

Here are some examples of “Bias for Action” questions for a

manager job:

• Tell me about a time where you felt your team was

not moving to action quickly enough. What did you
do?
• Tell me about a time when you were able to remove
a serious roadblock/barrier preventing your team
from making progress? How were you able to remove
the barrier? What was the outcome?
• Describe a time when you made an important
business decision. What was the situation and how
did it turn out?
• Tell me about a time when you had to make a
decision with incomplete information. How did you
make it and what was the outcome?
I recommend that, for a managerial role, you focus on the
leadership principles “Hire and Develop,” “Are Right, A Lot,”
and “Bias for Action.” However, to really stand out among
other candidates, be sure to prepare stories and answers to
questions on all the leadership principles. Let’s look at the
other principles and the questions you can anticipate
getting for managerial and leadership roles.

Customer Obsession
• In your opinion, what is the most effective way to
evaluate the quality of your product or service to your
internal /external customer? Give an example of a
time when you used these measures to make a
decision.
• What changes have you implemented in your current
department to meet the needs of your customers?
What has been the result?

Deliver Results
• How do you ensure you are focusing on the right
deliverables when you have several competing
priorities? Tell me about a time when you did not
effectively manage your projects and something fell
through the cracks
• What’s your secret to success in setting stretch goals
for your team that are challenging, yet achievable?
Tell me about a time you didn’t hit the right balance.
How did you adjust?
• Give an example of a mission or goal you didn’t think
was achievable. What was it and how did you help
your team try to achieve it. Were you successful in the
end?

Ownership
• How do you ensure your team stays connected to the
company vision and the bigger picture? Give an
example of when you felt a team or individual goal
was in conflict with the company vision. What did you
do?
• Tell me about an initiative you undertook because
you saw that it could benefit the whole company or
your customers, but wasn’t within any group’s
individual responsibility so nothing was being done.

Think Big
• Tell me about a time you came up with the vision for
a (team, product, strategic initiative) when there
wasn’t a guiding vision. What was it? How did you
gain buy-in and drive execution?
• Tell me about encouraging or enabling a member of
your team to take big risk. How did you balance the
risk to the business with possible positive outcome for
the organization and opportunity for learning for your
direct report?
• Tell me about time you had to develop a
product/business model from scratch or when you
dramatically changed one in a turnaround situation.

Dive Deep
• As a manager, how do you stay connected to the
details while focusing on the strategic, bigger picture
issues? Tell me about a time when you were too far
removed from a project one of your employees was
working on and you ended up missing a goal
• When your direct reports are presenting a plan or
issue to you, how do you know if the underlying
assumptions are the correct ones? What actions do
you take to validate assumptions or data?

Earn Trust
• Tell me about a time your team’s goals were out of
alignment with another team on which you relied to
attain a key resource. How did you work with the
other team? Were you able to achieve your goals?
• Tell me about a time you uncovered a significant
problem in your team. What was it and how did you
communicate it to your manager and to your peers
or other stakeholders?

Frugality
• Give an example of a time when you challenged
your team to come up with more efficient solution or
process. What drove the request? How did you help?
• How do you determine when to award or ask for
additional resources? What criteria do you use for
making the call?
• Tell me how you have created organization (or
customer) value through either increased revenue
stream or lowering the cost structure.

Have Backbone
• Give an example of when you had to support a
business initiative with which you didn’t necessarily
agree. How did you handle it?
• Tell me about a time when you pushed back against
a decision that negatively impacted your team. What
was the issue and how did it turn out?

Insist on Highest Standards

• How do you seek out feedback on your team’s
performance? Give a specific example of how you
used feedback you received on your team to drive
improvement. Can you tell me about a time when a
team member was not being as productive as you
needed? What was the situation? What did you do?
What was the result?
• Describe the process you go through to set specific
targets to improve critical areas of your work/team.
Please refer to a specific example.

Invent and Simplify

• How do you draw new thinking and innovation out of
your team? Give an example of how your approach
led to a specific innovation.
• Tell me about a time when you have enabled your
team/ a team member to implement a significant
change or improvement.

Learn and Be Curious

• Tell me about a time when you challenged your team
to push the envelope and go beyond existing
standards and expectations.
• Give a specific example of where you realized your
team had not been as effective as it could have.
What feedback mechanisms do you use?
• Example when someone on your team challenged
you to think differently about a problem? What was
the situation, how did you respond?
• Example where your team was unable to achieve a
goal or milestone, but the information gathered
during the project enabled future success.
• Tell me about a time when a member of your team
contributed significantly to a project outside the
scope of their role. What motivated you to
encourage their participation.
How Behavioral Interview Answers
Are Rated
Interviewing relies heavily on “soft skills,” such as
communication, public speaking, problem solving, decision
making, and so on. Soft skills are hard to quantify or rate
because there’s no agreed upon system for doing so.

Think about how you judge whether a presentation was

good. Was it good because the slides were good, because
the speaker made good eye contact, or because the
information was at the right level? If you asked ten people
why they liked a presentation, you’d get ten different
answers since each person has their own judgement, and
there’s no universally agreed on system for rating
presentations.

It’s also hard to rate performance in an interview. There’s no

universally agreed on system to rate answers. However,
since the goal of an interview is to pick the best candidate,
interviewers need a rational system to grade candidates. In
an effort to help interviewers rate candidates’ responses
more fairly and consistently, many companies have tried to
create an evaluation system that’s as standardized and
quantified as possible.

Let’s look at the system Amazon invented and uses for rating
candidates.

Amazon Interview Rating Scale

In Amazon interviews, the interviewers aren’t using a
company-wide scale to rate candidates. If this scale existed,
I’d share it with you.
So if Amazon is not using a company-wide scale, how do
interviewers decide which candidate is best?

Amazon interviewers rank candidates in categories, which

varies based on the job. Categories typically relate to the
leadership principles and the functional requirements of the
job.

What do I mean exactly? Let’s say that the leadership

principle “Customer Obsession” is an important component
of the job you’re interviewing for. This is common with sales
and marketing jobs, for instance. The interviewers will pay
extra close attention to your answers to questions related to
this principle. They then discuss with each other how you did
on that topic.

They will typically evaluate whether your skills in that

category:

• Far exceed requirements

• Exceed requirements
• Meet requirements
• Fall below requirements
• Show a significant gap from the requirements
Like I said, Amazon doesn’t use a single, standardized scale.
One department might use numbers (e.g., 1–5), one might
use letter grades (A–F), and another might use a scale like
the one I just described. However, in the end, the method of
assessment itself isn’t important.

The important thing to know is that, if the job requires

“Customer Obsession” and you fall into the “meets
requirements” grade (or equivalent), you’ll be considered
average. If another candidate rates higher, you’ll lose to
that person in that category.

How to Know What Categories You’ll Get Rated On

I get a lot of questions about the exact questions that
Amazon interviewers will ask. The truth is, I don’t know.
Questions are different for each job title and each
department, and each department changes their questions
over time. One of the things that makes interviews
challenging is that you aren’t going to get a list beforehand
of the qualities and skills that the interviewers will base their
assessments on. You know that the interviewers will rank you
according to what they think is important for that job, but
what are those things?

To be prepared, you have to figure out for yourself the things

they’re going to ask and rate you on. The job description
and your general knowledge of what the job requires are
good clues of what they’ll take into consideration when
evaluating your ability to do the job.

Since it’s Amazon we’re talking about, assume that the

leadership principles most relevant for the role will be among
the categories you’ll be judged on. Sometimes the recruiter
will help you and tell you that the interviewers will focus on a
few leadership principles. This tip can point you in the right
direction, but don’t assume that your interviewers won’t ask
you about the other leadership principles as well. You need
to prepare for all of them. Also, the recruiter is likely giving
the same advice to other candidates, so your goal is to
distinguish yourself from rivals by preparing stories that really
speak to the principles.
Let’s look at an example that I hope will help you get into
the right mindset.

For a sales-related role, the top three leadership principles

are typically “Customer Obsession,” “Bias for Action,” and
“Deliver Results.” If you’re applying for a role in sales, you
can take it as a given that you’ll be asked about and
assessed on these principles. But in preparing for your
interview, don’t make the mistake of ignoring the other
eleven principles.

So besides the principles that most obviously align to the

role, what other principles should you focus on to best
prepare for the interview? Answering this question requires a
bit of conjecture, but the following approach has helped
many of my clients:

1. Start by making a list of the skills and experience that

appear in the Amazon job description.
2. Search Google for other job descriptions with the
same title at any company. Reviewing these job
descriptions can help paint a more complete picture
of what the market expects for someone in the role. If
you look at several job descriptions, patterns will
emerge that you can use to make a best guess at
what the job market (and Amazon) values in
candidates for the role.
3. Once you collect enough information, make a
master list of requirements that are common for that
job title. If the list is too long, try narrowing it down to
five to seven items.
4. Now, compare this list to the complete list of
leadership principles. You should be able to map
between the two lists. For example, if one of the items
on your list is “ability to make tough decisions,” you
would want to focus on “Are Right, A Lot” as one of
the principles to prepare stories for.
You can read the section in the book about predicting the
questions for more ideas. This chapter has some of the best
guidance on interview preparation in the book, so if you
haven’t read it, I highly recommend that you check it out.

What will get me the highest rating?

What exactly will get you a “far exceeds requirements” or
an “A+” rating? There is no one answer to this question, but
much of my book is dedicated to helping you formulate
answers that will lead to positive outcomes.

You have to know the leadership principles, and you must

have stories about yourself that demonstrate that you
embody these principles. My book includes several
examples to inspire you and help you tell your story.

Also, you must be well versed in the requirements for the job
itself. Read the job description, and then read it again. Go
through it with a fine-tooth comb and form a strategy for
each of the items mentioned in the job description. If the job
description mentions a technology you’ve had limited
exposure to, take the time to research it. Telling the
interviewer that you don’t have a lot of experience in that
area but that you researched the topic for the interview
sends a strong signal to the interviewer of your
professionalism and preparedness.

Finally, while humility is generally considered a good trait in a

person, the interview is no time to be humble. Only you can
sell yourself and your accomplishments. Help the interviewer
see how great you have been and will be.

How to give better answers

I hope you have found the techniques in this chapter
helpful. I’d like to share one more exercise that has helped
many of my clients. Some clients ask for step-by-step guide
on how to give answers that will get a good rating. The
following approach may help.

To formulate stronger answers, you can start by breaking

down your current job and the job you’re applying to into a
set of categories. As an example, let’s pretend you’re
applying for a Program Manager role. When thinking about
the role, consider the following categories:

• Scope/Influence
• Management
• Day-to-day tasks
• Impact
• Level of ambiguity
• Process improvement
The higher the job level, the wider the scope of your
responsibilities. The higher the job level, the more
management you have to do – as you move up, you will
have to manage more and more people. The higher the job
level, the more important the day-to-day tasks and the
bigger impact they have. Lower-level employees are usually
told to do a task and they do it but higher level ones will
often have to decide what to do and how to do it, which
can mean navigating ambiguity. And if you take ownership
of your role, you will try to help the company whenever you
can, improving whatever process you can.

Using my Program Manager example, consider the role in

light of the categories that I mentioned:

Scope & Influence – Works across teams. Influences their

customers, roadmap priorities, and decisions. May influence
external entity interactions.

Management – Mentors junior employees or peers usually

unofficially.

Day-to-Day – Work is tactical. Owns a small program.

Manages cross-functional projects/goals. Defines program
requirements and drives team(s)/partners to meet goals.
Accelerates progress by driving timely decisions. Able to
spot risks, ask the right questions. Clears blockers, escalates
appropriately. Makes trade-offs: time vs. quality vs.
resources.

Impact – Moderate. Multiple team goals and program-

related metrics. May impact a country or region.

Degree of ambiguity – Program strategy is defined. Business

problem and solution may not be defined. Delivers
independently but will seek direction.

Process improvement – Improves project and process

efficiency. Optimizes cross-team processes that improve
team efficacy and delivery.

If, on the other hand, the role is a Senior Program Manager,

then the responsibilities shift and are larger in scope, and the
work is more strategic in nature. If you look at the same
categories again, note how the duties and responsibilities
have changed for the more senior position:

Scope & Influence – Works within a VP organization.

Influences large customer segments, technology decisions,
or external entity interaction.

Management – Actively mentors and develops others.

Day-to-Day – Work is tactical and strategic. Owns a large

program. Manages the lifecycle of complex initiatives.
Unblocks teams and increases the speed of delivery.
Negotiates resources and priorities. Learning to force
multiply effectively. Able to find a path forward in difficult
situations. Makes trade-offs between short-term needs vs.
long-term needs.

Impact – High. Sets organizational goals, and program-

related metrics. May have cross- region impact.

Degree of ambiguity – Business problem may not be well-

defined. Program strategy may not be defined. Delivers
independently, with limited guidance.

Process improvement – Improves, streamlines, and/or

eliminates excess process. Drives efficiencies. Creates
predictable process paths.

So how might you apply this knowledge to improve your

ratings with your interviewers?

First, consider the job that you’re doing now, and view it
through the lens of each of the categories above.

Next, for the job you’re applying to, look at the job
description, job descriptions across the internet that share
the same title, and anything else you know about the job.
Again, as you did with your current job, see if you can
understand this new role by Scope & Influence,
Management, Day-to-Day, Impact, Degree of Ambiguity,
and Process Improvement.

Your goal in this exercise is to better understand how your

current set of skills and experience map to the expectations
of the new role. If the two lists you made have a lot of
overlap and similarity, then you are effectively making a
lateral move and the stories you tell should map nicely to
the level of the job.

If, however, the new job seems to require greater

responsibility and would be more of a stretch for you, you’ll
want to adapt your stories accordingly. For example, you
might have stories that demonstrate your ability to navigate
a high degree of ambiguity, even if your current role doesn’t
strictly require it. You need to show your interviewer you can
operate at the higher level.
Using Stories
Behavioral questions aren’t questions you can answer “yes”
or “no” to. If you're asked to "Describe a time you failed at
something," you can't just say, “Yes.”

To answer behavioral questions, use a story. Some people

think of these questions as “story questions.”

The story you use as your answer should be about something

that happened to you at work (unless you don't have much
or any work experience) that shows the skills you've been
asked a question about. Don’t use personal stories.

Why does storytelling work in interviews? It works because

the stories are giving information to show that you can do
the job. Stories work because they help the interviewer
connect with and understand you. Stories help you connect
with the interviewer on a logical/factual and emotional
level. The goal isn’t to entertain, but to help the interviewer
understand you so you can ultimately get the job.

If you want some more help writing your stories, keep

reading. By the end of the book, you’ll understand why you
need to write stories and how to write good ones.

How Many Different Stories Do I Need?

Once a client said to me, “Behavioral questions are like the
ocean, there’s no end to them.”

I understand what he was getting at, because everyday

someone asks me how many behavioral questions they
need to prepare for, and I have to tell them I don’t know.
There is an infinite variety of behavioral questions, and I
don’t know how many you’ll get asked in your interview.
Because you can’t know how many you’ll get asked, you
need to do your best to prepare for as many as possible.

I recommend having between fifteen and thirty good stories.

If you have fewer than fifteen you could be in trouble, but if
you have more than thirty, it’s hard to remember them all.

Create a pool of stories

Create a pool of stories – between fifteen and thirty – and
then tailor your stories for different questions depending on
which ones they ask you.

Tailor each story

What do I mean by tailoring a story for whatever question
you get asked?

Well, say you have a story about helping a customer. This

story will probably work for whatever customer-related
question you get.

But what if you get no “Customer Obsession” questions but

five about taking “Ownership” of a project?

What if you have two stories you’ve planned to use for

“Ownership,” but you also have two “Customer Obsession”
stories. You use your two “Ownership” stories, but then you
get asked a third “Ownership” question. What do you do?
You could not answer the question, or you could take one of
your “Customer Obsession” stories and use it to answer the
“Ownership” question, if you change the wording a little. The
latter is obviously the best choice because it’s best if you
answer all of the questions.

Altering, or tailoring, an answer quickly isn’t easy and can

take some practice. What you want to do is create a group
of stories, and then spend your prep time practicing tailoring
a story to work for different questions. If you practice tailoring
stories, you will get good enough so you can adapt them
quickly, after you hear what question you need to answer.

You can take a basic story and alter it to fit whatever

question you get asked. If you get asked a “Customer
Obsession” question, you’ll focus your answer on talking
about the customer. If you get asked an “Ownership”
question, you’ll focus your answer on how you took charge.
If you get asked a “Deliver Results” question, you’ll focus
your answer on the successful outcome. And so on.

But really, how many stories will I need?

I said to prepare fifteen to thirty stories, but how many will
you actually need?

I don’t know how many behavioral questions they will ask

you. Each interview is different. If you have five, six, or seven
interviewers, and they each ask you five behavioral
questions, that’s thirty-five questions. They may not ask you
five questions each or you may not have seven interviewers,
but what if you have five interviewers and they each ask you
seven behavioral questions? Do you have enough stories to
answer that many questions?

Prepare as many good stories as you can.

How to Track Your Stories

As you know by now, you’ll need stories you can use for your
answers to behavioral questions. If you’ve started practicing
answering these questions, you’ve probably realized thinking
of good stories and then picking the right one to answer
each question isn’t that easy.
How can you track your stories and pick the right one
quickly in your interview?

Think about this problem – what if you have 30 stories? How

will you know which is the best for a particular question
without reading them all, which you won’t have time to do
in your interview?

I used to think writing them down in a spreadsheet was good

enough, but I realized a lot of people were having trouble
getting to the right question fast enough.

How do you create a story tracking system that lets you

easily/quickly select the best accomplishment?

I think the best way to help you pick a story quickly is to give
your story a short name that has keywords in it. This way you
can find it quickly.

In your spreadsheet, write down the keyword the story is

about. Then write down the story – I advise using bullet points
only, or else you might accidentally memorize it word for
word.

Once you’ve gotten further in your practice and know the

stories well enough, you can make a smaller version of the
spreadsheet with only the keywords on it. In phone
interviews you can actually keep the condensed version
with you so you can scan it if you get stuck.

Can I Write Your Stories for You?

If you’re planning to work with me, I can definitely help you
with your stories, but I can’t think of them for you because I
don’t know what you’ve done in your past jobs.
I get a lot of requests to write answers for clients but that’s
really impossible for me to do. I can help you brainstorm
ideas for stories, because I’ve heard so many of them, and I
can help you improve your stories, but you’re going to have
to write the basic outline and think of some details yourself.

Be careful about buying answers that someone else wrote.

You can copy the structure of someone else’s answer, but if
you copy more than the structure your answer won’t sound
natural.

If you work with me you’ll end up with a portfolio of answers

that you can use for the behavioral questions and if you
work with another coach you should end up with the same
thing.

What Makes a Good Story?

A good story makes you seem like a good candidate for the
job. So the main thing your story needs to do is show you
have skills that relate to the new job.

How do you do that?

• Pick the right topic to talk about.

• Tell the story clearly using the STAR/PAR technique.
• Include enough details so your answer hits the length
of one to two minutes.
Most of this book is actually about how you write good
stories. I’ll get into answers for specific questions later and I’ll
also talk about the STAR/PAR method later.
How to Create Your Stories: Brainstorming
To answer behavioral questions, you’ll need to use a story.
How can you think of stories?

I have a bad memory so it’s hard for me to remember what I

did at past jobs. If you have a similar problem remembering
what you did at work, here are some tips that might help
you think of material you can use for stories:

• Look through your old files or emails.

• Ask past colleagues about past projects.
• Ask past colleagues what they think you did well.
• Look through your old performance reports.
• Look at your resume – if you wrote it correctly, you’ll
have your past projects and successes written on it.
• If you still can’t remember anything, look at the job
description (or your old job descriptions) for clues.
What do they want you to be able to do – have you
ever done that?
These points should help you create stories about what you
did at past jobs.

You can also think of things that happened in the past in

terms of accomplishments. What successes did you have?
Once you’ve written down the major ones, think of
anymore, even if they weren’t quite as substantial. If you
don’t have a great achievement from the workplace, think
back to internships or time in school.

Hints to help you think of accomplishments or failures:

• Did you think of an idea that got used?

• Were you creative in some way?
• Did you show leadership?
• Did you set a goal and accomplish it?
You’ll probably be asked about successes in your interview
so it’s useful to think of as many success stories as possible.

You’ll need stories about mistakes or failures too. Try to think

of failures that you learned something from, since you’ll
need to include what you learned as part of the story.

Plan stories based on the functional competencies

You can plan your stories starting with functional
competencies, also known as job requirements. If you need
SQL skills for the job and you can think of a story about how
you did something successful with these skills, you can make
a story about that.

Go through the job description and look for all of the points
that they are looking for in a candidate. This is really the
same process that you should have used to predict what
questions they’ll ask you.

Each item they are looking for is something you may have
done in the past. If you have, think of a story about it.

How to get enough details for your stories

The first phase of writing a story is thinking of an idea, and
the second phase is thinking of details.

Once you have your idea, write as much info as you can
about it. Aim for at least a page of writing. If you can
remember any details, write them down. You can also talk
to someone who worked on the project with you for more
details.
Don’t edit yourself before you write. Don’t worry about
structure. Just write down some notes in any kind of form. If
you write everything you can think of down without worrying
about whether it’s good, you’ll think of the most possible
details.

Here are some prompts you can use to think of details:

• Where was I when this happened? Where was I

working? Who did I work for or with?
• What was the situation? What was I doing related to
the situation?
• How did I feel? Was I stressed? Was I happy?
• What actions did I take? Why did I do this?
• What happened in the end? Did I learn something
from this?
Once you’ve remembered everything you can about the
incident, then you can extract the best info and turn that
into a story.

Don’t Use Personal Stories

The story should be about something that happened to you
at work (unless you don't have much or any work
experience) that shows the skills you've been asked a
question about.

Don’t use personal stories, even for the “risk” question – for
some reason everyone wants to use a personal story for this.
It’s okay to use a personal story if it’s about starting your own
company, but that’s the only personal story that’s okay to
use.
Story Structure

The STAR method

In the answers to behavioral questions, you need tell a story
about your past experience.

The STAR technique was invented to help you give good

answers to these behavioral questions by telling clear stories.

STAR isn’t just used by Amazon. It’s a standard format for

answering behavioral questions and although there are
other formats STAR is the most well known so your answers
will work for other companies too if you happen to be
interviewing in more than one place.

What is the STAR technique?

The STAR technique is a very common system used to answer
behavioral interview questions. (You can’t really use it for
questions like “Tell me about yourself.”) It provides a structure
for you to remember so that you include the correct data in
your answers.

These are the four steps of the technique:

S – Situation: background information

T – Task: what you had to do
A – Activity: what you did
R – Result: positive; quantifiable; what you learned;
what you would do differently next time
If you get asked a behavioral question, answer by going
through the letters in order. First give the S part (explain the
basic situation). Then give the T (what was your job/task in
this situation?) Then A (show what you did). Last, give the R
(outcome).

The goal is to focus on all of the steps equally. Don’t skip a

step. If you focus more on the actions and skip the results,
you’ll look like a low-level employee who isn’t interested in
the consequences of her actions. If you focus on results
without actions, you’ll look more like a manager, but
managers also need to be aware of actions as well as
results.

Sample answer: “Tell me about a goal you had and how you
achieved it.”
S/T – After I got promoted, I realized that we had more
projects than originally pIanned, and I would need more
product managers to complete them. Hiring was my
responsibility, so I needed to decide how many to hire.

A – I charted our planned projects and then decided how

many people I thought I needed. I used our records as well
as my own observations. I came up with the number of
people and then asked my colleagues for their opinions.
Once we had a final number, I worked with recruiting to
interview candidates and eventually hired the right number
of people.

R – Now we're adequately staffed, and the work is going

well.

Tip This is a good answer, but if possible, pick an example

where you can use numbers in your results. For instance,
"And we made 5% more this quarter," or "My sales numbers
are up 25% over last year." Numbers, particularly money,
make the results more impressive.
Sample answer – “Tell me about a time you had a difficult
situation with an employee.”
S/T – I recently had an employee, one of my product
managers, who was not performing well. The people she
worked with were complaining about her attitude and the
executives were complaining about the quality of her work.
They wanted me to fire her, but I wasn't sure that was the
right thing to do.

A – I talked to HR and the executive team, and we decided

to collect the evidence about her performance in a
document and then present it to her. I did this. During her
review, she was very angry and blamed her problems on the
company structure. In the end, we decided that we would
closely together for 60 days to improve her performance.

R – My plan was successful in that her performance did

improve (as well as her attitude). I'm not happy with the
amount of time I have to spend with her, but I hope that by
spending the time mentoring her now I will end up with a
good product manager who can work independently of
me.

Do I actually need to use a structure in my answers?

Interviewers are given instructions from Amazon on how to
evaluate answers. The first part of the instructions explicitly
directs them to evaluate the example using STAR: “Stories
have beginnings (Situation/Task), middle (Actions), and ends
(Results).”

Clearly the first thing you need to do is make sure the

interviewer actually understands the story. Do you have to
use STAR? Not necessarily. As long as your story has a
beginning, a middle, and an end it should be clear.
PAR not STAR
I hope you now understand STAR, but what is PAR?

Many people who know the STAR method find it confusing

to use because the S and the T steps seem so similar. If you
have no idea what I’m talking about you can skip this
section and keep using STAR.

So, the “situation” and “task” steps in STAR, they seem kind
of similar, right? Yeah, they do. I’ve had many clients ask me
to explain the difference between the two.

To save everyone from confusion, I’ve started teaching my

clients to use “PAR,” which is the same as STAR but combines
the S and the T steps. Can you do that, combine the steps?
Yes, of course you can. In my opinion they’re already
combined. What I mean is that when you’re stating the
problem you’re usually automatically also stating (or
implying) the task you have to do to solve the problem.

Why call it P instead of S? S and P are the same thing –

situation, problem, issue – it doesn’t really matter what you
call it, it’s the same thing.

P – Problem/situation/issue
A – Action (what did you do?)
R – Result
Now use the letters as a structure to tell your story.

Will the interviewers notice that you’re not using STAR? No.
Absolutely not. Your answer will sound the same, but the first
section will probably be clearer because you won’t be
saying the same thing twice, and it will most certainly be
clearer to you while you’re preparing it.
A good sample answer for a common behavioral question
This is a common behavioral interview question that you
might be asked in an interview. I've marked it with the PAR
sections so you can see the structure of the answer.

Give an example of a goal you reached and tell me how

you achieved it
Problem – Last year at my quarterly review my boss
explained to me that I needed to improve my public
speaking skills, since I'm in marketing and give presentations
to my colleagues and clients frequently. He said that I speak
too softly and too quickly and don't explain my ideas clearly.

Action – I didn't know how to get better at this, so I hired an

executive coach. I worked with her for a month, and then
joined a group of her former clients who meet once a week
to give speeches in front of each other. With her help and all
of their comments and support, I learned to see what my
weaknesses were.

Results – After working on my skills for several months, I could

see that my presentations were better. At my next review,
my boss agreed. Now I'm continuing to meet with the group
so that my skills keep improving. I want to be even better
than I am now so that I give excellent presentations.

This answer follows the PAR structure.

SOAR Versus STAR Versus PAR

Which structure should you use to answer behavioral

questions?
You may have noticed that there are quite a few different
acronyms out there relating to behavioral question answer
format. Each one is a different template to use to answer
behavioral questions. Which one is the best?

I want to explain to you what the idea is behind these

structures/acronyms so you can make your own decision.

On the most basic level all the formats are trying to make it
easier for you to answer behavioral questions. And hey,
that’s great, because it actually does make it easier to
remember what to include in your story if you remember an
acronym.

But why does one person say to use STAR and one person
say to use SOAR, etc.? If I don’t listen to the right person, will I
fail my interview?

I understand the anxiety you’re feeling, because the people

writing about this topic don’t make it easy. When someone
says to use STAR, for instance, they usually say “this is the
structure you need to use to answer these questions.” They
don’t say “this is one of many possible structures you can use
if you want to.” It’s always presented as if this were the best
and only option. But the truth is, you have quite a few
choices.

But if I use the wrong one, will my answer be wrong? No, and
this is why: these structures are essentially the same.

SOAR
S – Situation
O – Obstacle
A – Action
R – Result

STAR
S – Situation
T – Task
A – Action
R – Result

STARI
S – Situation
T – Task
A – Action
R – Result
I – Impact

PAR
P – Problem
A – Action
R – Result

So as you can see, they have similar but not always identical
sections (the letters). Let’s do a comparison so you can see
the actual differences.

Situation / Problem
For the first section, you’ve got S or P, Situation or Problem.
And what does that mean? State the problem, or issue, or
situation. It doesn’t matter what you call it, it means the
same thing.

Task / Obstacle
For the second section, you’ve got task or obstacle (Or
nothing). Okay, which is better? Well, think about the first
section. Let’s do an example. What is the problem you are
talking about? Let’s say the problem is that I’m the IT
Manager for my department and one of the computers is
broken and it needs to be fixed today but I don’t have
anyone free to fix it. Okay. Well, so what is my task? Fix the
computer. In my opinion, this has already been stated in the
problem, so we don’t need a task section. What is my
obstacle? Broken computer? No time? No resources? Again,
already stated in the problem.

If you are stating your problem or situation correctly, you will

be including the information about task.

Here’s another example in case you don’t see what I mean.

Your problem is that you have a report due for your client in
five days. Well, the task is that you need to finish the report in
five days. Even if you don’t say this out loud, the task is
implied in the problem statement. Although I do think that a
good problem statement will be very clear and explicit
about the issues at hand.

Obstacle is whatever might keep you from fixing the

problem or completing the task. Again, in my opinion, if
there is an obstacle it should be part of the problem
statement. In the first example I gave, if your obstacle is that
everyone in your department is out sick that day, you should
say that as you state the problem. In the second example, if
your obstacle is that the client won’t respond to you to give
you the information you need to include in your report, that
should be part of the problem statement.

If you keep forgetting to state the task or obstacle in your

answers, you can use the acronym that will remind you, but
for me the T and O are part of the problem, so I always
mention them.

Action
The Action step is included in all the structures.

Result / Impact
You obviously need an ending to every story, which is why
we have the results section. Do we also need an impact
section? Well, to me they are the same. If you see a
difference between result and impact you can use both
sections, but I don’t see a difference. If you have a good
results section that is enough.

Lessons learned
In internal interviews at Amazon the structure they give you
to follow adds a “Lessons Learned” section after results. In
some questions, like the mistake/failure one, the learning
section is built in. In other questions it’s up to you whether
you want to talk about what you learned. Sometimes that’s
a natural part of a story and sometimes not.

If it helps you to add an L at the end of whatever acronym

you choose, you can do that.
Selling Yourself in Interviews
Job interviews in the United States require that you talk
about your strengths, which is also called selling yourself or
self-promotion.

What Is Selling Yourself?

“Selling yourself” in an interview is the process of talking
openly, clearly, and directly about your strengths – your skills,
experience, and personal qualities – and explicitly stating
how these strengths can help the company.

It’s a form of marketing, but the product you’re marketing is

you.

Why Is Self-Promotion Hard for Some People?

In your daily life you don’t usually get asked about your
strengths or what your greatest achievement was, right?
Probably not. That’s not something that happens to us
normally, except in interviews. So self-promotion is a skill that
many of us just don’t use very often.

In addition, many of us have also been taught to be

humble, or not to say too much about our own strengths.
Americans see selling yourself as a good thing, but many
cultures, like those in Asia, think it’s unfavorable to talk about
how good you are.

Also, women tend to be worse at self-promotion than men.

It’s generally not socially acceptable, even in America, for
women to brag. If you’re taught at home not to brag, it’s
hard to learn to do it quickly before your interview.
Can You Improve Your Self-Promotion Skills?
“But I don’t know how to sell myself!” is something that I hear
often in my interview coaching work.

I love hearing this because I know I can help. It’s easy for
me, because my clients are usually smart and successful in
their work, but they don’t know how to express this. I can
teach them how – and it isn’t very hard.

Interviews are a type of communication that isn’t like

anything else. They’re like a game you have to learn to play.
If you’ve never played the game before, you won’t know
how, but if you learn the rules and practice, you’ll be able to
play.

You’re telling me you can learn Java or Hadoop, but you

can’t learn to talk about your strengths? I find that hard to
believe.

Why Do I Need to Sell Myself?

You’ve probably heard that you need to sell yourself in
interviews, but you might not understand exactly why.

An interview is a very short time frame. The interviewer needs

to make a decision about you quickly. They’ll know more
about your skills and experience if you tell them.

Can’t they just read your resume? Yes, your resume is a

document you use for self-promotion. In your interview you
need to assume the interviewer hasn’t read your resume
(because sometimes this is true) so you will need to tell them
about your selling points, meaning your unique strengths.
Even if they have read your resume, they’ll remember things
better if they read it and also hear it from you.
I’m sure you’ve known someone who got a job that you
didn’t think they were qualified for. You may have even
seen someone in your office get promoted before someone
else who was better for the role. Why does this happen?
Sometimes it happens because the person was a good
interviewer.

If you don’t sell yourself well, you might lose the job to
someone who does, even if you would be better at the job.

Selling Yourself Isn’t Being Fake

I’m not saying that you need to go into the interview and do
an “elevator pitch” or a sales pitch.

These pitches have a bad reputation because they’re

what’s known as the “hard sell,” or being very aggressive
with marketing.

That’s not what I mean by marketing yourself. That kind of

marketing yourself can be a mistake because you aren’t
telling the interviewer what they need to know, just what you
think they should know.

That type of marketing can be too aggressive for an

interview because it’s one way – it’s you talking (and
talking). An interview should be two people talking, like in a
conversation.

I think it’s possible to market yourself in a natural way. I’ll try

to teach you to figure out what your strengths are and
communicate them. That’s what I think selling yourself is.

1. Make a list of your top strengths

2. Tell the interviewer what they are
Just two steps. It’s definitely possible for you to plan this and
learn how to do it.

Focus on Your Core Messages

You don’t want to go into an interview and tell them
everything about yourself. Your interviewer doesn’t need to
know every detail.

They don’t need to know about every major deal you’ve

closed, every job you’ve had, every certification you have,
or every single programming language you know.

In your interview, you need to focus.

This is a huge problem for people.

When I ask my clients, “Tell me about your background,”

which is an alternative way to ask the common question
“Tell me about yourself,” some of them go on and on. I’ve
heard answers to this question that were over five minutes
long. This is much too long.

No one can listen for this long.

I know you’re thinking that you need to give a lot of info

here, so the interviewer knows your skills, but the interviewer
has a limited attention span.

Stick to giving shorter answers that focus on a few core

messages.

Plan your core messages / core competencies

Core messages are your strengths. They are also known as
your key selling points or core competencies.
They can be your skills, your education or training, your
experience, your key accomplishments, soft skills, or your
personality traits.

Don’t forget your experience. “Three years of Java” or “Ten

years of biz dev” are strengths. In fact, I think experience
should always be on your list (for most of you – there are
exceptions, like if you’re a student or changing careers).

How many core messages should you have?

I think three to five core messages is the best number. If you
use more, it may get hard for you to remember and you
may confuse your interviewer.

Your core messages should be on your resume already

If you’re not sure what to list as your strengths, look at your
resume. If you’ve done your resume correctly, everything
you want to list in the interview as your selling points should
already be listed there.

If you haven’t done your resume well, you may have to redo
your resume (but not send it in to them – just use it for your
own planning).

Check your core messages against the job description

Before you finalize your list, look at the job description right
now and see if your core messages, or something related to
them, are on the job description. If not, you need to rethink
your messages. There is no reason to try to sell your
interviewer on your skills if the skills don’t relate to the JD.

But understand the job description first.

Sometimes job descriptions aren’t written very clearly. Have
you ever read one that was a page long and realized that it
was the same thing written in different ways?

In some cases, you might need to translate the JD into

simple English before you start building your core messages
around it.

I was helping a client with one recently that we both had a

hard time understanding. The job was Associate Director of
Sales and Operations for the Global Sales and Operations
Planning and Optimization product team at Wayfair. He
asked me if I could help him go over the JD to make sure he
understood it before we started practicing for his interview.
And it was so hard to understand I couldn’t believe it (no
offence Wayfair, but you need to work on your JDs). In the
end the job boiled down to being a liaison between the
people who tracked customer demand and the logistics
people. But it absolutely did not say that in words that were
easy to understand.

Before we could even start practicing answers to questions,

we had to make sure we understood what the job was so he
could target the right things with his core messages.

Examples of core messages

In case you aren’t sure what I mean by core messages, here
are some examples I’ve taken from client resumes. I’ve
divided them by role.

Digital marketing
• Grew community from 2 million to 4.5 million, grew
influencer advocate program from zero to 3,000, and
drove 100,000+ webinar registrations in 2017
• Own $4+ million paid advertising budget with Krux
DMP segmentation reducing CPA 31% & increasing
conversion 54%
• Transformed conversion rates by 845% in trial software
downloads; reduced 2300+ landing pages into 1
dynamic page

Private equity and tech investing

• Quadrilingual: fluent in English, French, Polish, and
Russian
• Responsible for 300M€ spread between LP stakes in
venture funds, direct equity stakes and a GP,
spanning across the US, Europe, Israel and China
• Wrote blueprint for a pan-European impact investing
fund in the tech area

Solutions architect
• Expertise in Cloud and Hybrid technologies
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
• Implementation, support and evolution of the
external website for the regional airport authority
hosted in Microsoft Azure leveraging IaaS and PaaS
technologies
• Proficient in designing and implementing integration
solutions for legacy, Cloud-based and on-premise
applications using different integration patterns.

Business development
• At Siemens I led the cross-divisional Smart City
initiative, engaging at the CXO level with Smart Dubai
and major stakeholders in the Dubai infrastructure
space.
• Business development and key account
management of strategic enterprise customers
• Work with teams to create a strategic plan to grow
existing customers or acquire new ones. Formulating
pursuit strategies around customer needs and
Aricent’s unique propositions.
• Building and leading cross functional teams that won
large transformational deals.

Product management
• Hands-on product management executive with a
passion to build products that delight people
• Big Data platforms, Cloud, analytics, databases,
middleware, integration, NoSQL and UI
• Lead product vision, strategy, and building of next-
generation cloud hosting using containers, AWS and
Google Cloud
• PM for large-scale text processing built on custom
NoSQL with GraphDB and Lucene indexing with NLP
and ML for SNA apps
These are some examples of core messages/selling points
that you could use in an interview. They are all good ones,
as long as the job description is calling for these qualities.

If you say that you are an expert in “Big Data platforms,

Cloud, analytics, databases, middleware, integration,
NoSQL and UI” that’s fine as long as the job description
mentions at least some of these technologies OR you know
that the job requires them.

You absolutely need to target the job description or your

knowledge of what the role requires. It can be easy to list
your strengths because you’re proud of having certain skills,
but maybe the job doesn’t require most of them.

I was just working with a client named Rajan. He was having

a problem focusing his core messages. He had a lot of
experience, and it ranged across sales, operations, and
digital marketing roles, but he was applying for a senior level
product management role. He did actually have the right
experience, but he had so much other experience that it
was hard to understand that he was right for the job. In his
case we had to remove a lot of things he wanted to say
and really focus the things he should say into a few key
points.

Rank your selling points in order of most important to least

important
Okay, so remember the example I just gave of some of
these technologies?

• Big Data platforms, Cloud, analytics, databases,

middleware, integration, NoSQL and UI
This is a great selling point (as long as you need these in the
job), but should you list them first when you’re talking about
why they should hire you?

Well, probably yes if the job requires you to be working

directly with one or all of these every day. But probably not if
you’re applying to be the VP of Product. In the VP role you
will need to understand the technology, but it isn’t the most
important thing you need for the role. It might not even
make your list of top five selling points.

Say the most relevant selling point first in your interview. Like I
said before, frequently this might be your experience with
something.

Make up general statements or examples for your core

messages
You need a general statement and an example for each
message.

If your core message is that you’re an expert in Java, that’s

your general statement, so you need an example to back it
up. Also, show that you’re able to use that expertise to
deliver results.

You can say “I’m an expert in Java. At my current job, I've

written tens of thousands of lines of code for projects that
reached a large, enterprise user base. As a result of my
expertise, I was asked to lead the Android development
team, and we shipped the company's first mobile app in
under four months. The app currently has a 4.8-star rating in
the Google Play Store, and has helped our company gain
market share."

If your core message is that you are a “Hands-on product

management executive with a passion to build products
that delight people” that’s your general statement and you
need an example to back it up. Again, try to focus on
results. Use numbers to bolster your case.

You can say “We just rolled out a new video player that has
five thousand daily active users just two weeks after launch,
up from just a few hundred users last month.”
How do you use these selling points?
Once you know your core messages, you need to say them
at certain points during the interview. The key is to bring in
your core messages as part of your answers to the interview
questions.

Where can you use your core messages?

You can use them in your responses to these questions:

• Tell me about yourself.

• Tell me about your background.
• Walk me through your resume.
• What are your strengths?
• Why should we hire you?
• Why do you want to work at Amazon?
• Why do you want this job?
• What are the responsibilities of your current job?
• In the stories you use to answer behavioral questions
Which Leadership Principle Is This
Question Asking Me About?
If your Amazon interviewer asks a behavioral question, how
will you know which leadership principle they’re asking
about?

If your interviewer asks, “When have you taken a risk?”, do

you know which principle this question falls under? How
quickly did you figure it out?

How to connect the leadership principles to the questions is

a topic my clients ask me about frequently. Many of my
clients make spreadsheets with their stories and map them
to the associated principles, which I think is a great
organizational approach. But – what if you take the time to
make a spreadsheet, and yet you still can’t remember the
correct principle once you’re in the interview?

I used to tell my clients to memorize the most common

questions for each principle so that they would immediately
know which principle to target in their answers. While I
continue to believe this comprehensive approach is the best
way to prepare for an interview at Amazon, it can take a lot
of time to become familiar with the fourteen principles –
time that you may not have if your interview is coming fast.

Shortcut
So I’ll give you a shortcut: just make sure your answers – to
any question – demonstrate excellence or high
performance.

How can I say that? How can you answer the question if you
don’t know which principle the interviewer is asking about?
Isn’t the whole goal of the interview to show that you fit the
principles? Yes, that is the goal of the interview. But you can
still demonstrate you’re a good fit for the principles without
knowing which exact principle the interviewer is asking
about. How? Let’s think about it.

Consider the principles as a whole

Put together, what is the general idea behind the principles?
If I had to choose one word to describe the primary theme
across all principles, I would pick “excellence,” a trait found
in all high-performing individuals. Excellence is apparent in
every principle.

For example, consider “Customer Obsession,” which is the

first principle and is covered in detail in the next section.
“Customer Obsession” means caring deeply about the
customer and doing excellent work for them. So if you get a
question like, “How do you develop relationships with
clients?”, you must demonstrate in your answer that you
have a process for forming relationships with customers that
is extraordinarily good. We’ll go over some specific examples
when we examine the principle in detail.

Questions about “Customer Obsession” are easy to spot

because they usually include the word “customer.” What
about something less obvious? Consider a common Amazon
interview question such as, “Tell me about a time you had to
go above and beyond.” Which principle is this question
referencing? It might be “Ownership” or “Highest Standards”
or “Bias for Action,” but it doesn’t really matter. You don’t
have to know which principle it references in order to craft a
terrific answer. You simply need to show in your answer that
you’ve taken the initiative to do something outside of your
normal routine and done an excellent job of it. If in your
answer you’re successful in demonstrating your excellence,
you’re showing “Ownership” and the other principles it
relates to as well.

Use the shortcut instead of panicking

I recommend you memorize answers for each principle, but
as I said before, that can take time. In an interview situation,
you may (and probably will) be asked a question that
doesn’t map cleanly to one of the principles, or does map
to a principle but you just can’t remember which one, or
maps to more than one. If that happens, don’t panic. If
you’re asked, for example, about going “above and
beyond” and you don’t remember which principle(s) the
question relates to, don’t waste time fretting about the
exact principle. Instead, focus on answering the question in
a way that demonstrates your excellence. Show how you
refused to accept the status quo (even when others around
you did accept it), performed beyond expectations, and
strove for excellence (even if you didn’t completely
succeed).

In suggesting this approach, I don’t mean to be overly

simplistic. I mention it because I see so many of my clients go
to an interview, get stuck on what specific principle they’re
supposed to be talking about, panic, and give a bad
answer. When the interviewer asks a question, people
mentally run through all the principles and wonder which
one to address. That’s a waste of time. Answering questions
quickly and confidently is important.

So once again, before the interview, ask yourself what the

principles as a whole mean. Why do they exist? What are
the interviewers really looking for?
What do people always look for in any interview? They’re
looking for someone who demonstrates excellence. You
need to be that kind of person. Are you the type of person
who will always bend over backwards to help the customer,
who will always do more than is required, and who performs
well without supervision? That’s excellence, and that’s what
they’re looking for.

Pretend you’re not even interviewing with Amazon. How

would you answer the question if the principles didn’t exist?

If you’re reading this chapter and identifying with the

problem I’m talking about, you may be obsessing over the
principles too much.

Am I Overanalyzing?
I get this question a lot from clients who’ve put a lot of time
into their story spreadsheets. Are you overanalyzing? Well,
not necessarily. If I had an interview coming up for my
dream job, I’d be spending a lot of time prepping too.

However. Step back for a second. You may be fixating too

much on the idea that there are these principles you must
adhere to. Think about the Amazon culture as a whole. Or
step back even further and think about American tech
culture as a whole. Do you fit in with that? Forget the
individual principles and figure that out.

What is American tech culture? I talked about excellence

before, but can we get more specific? Do your answers
show you will do what it takes to succeed (as long as it’s
legal and ethical) – whether succeeding is creating a great
product, or giving your customer what they want, or
whatever else? Will you work hard and fight for your idea?
Are you highly analytical, data centric, and competitive?
Are you comfortable selling yourself?

The Bottom Line

Do you keep researching and researching the principles,
reading more and more articles, and watching more and
more videos trying to understand them? That’s a sign you
may be going overboard on the principles. Focus instead on
creating stories that show you’re a high performer in your
area. Focus on your own excellence.
How to Answer Questions About
Each Leadership Principle
The first and most important Amazon leadership principle is
“Customer Obsession.”

I recommend that everyone, no matter what role you’re

interviewing for, prepare answers for the customer obsession
questions. This is truly Amazonians’ favorite principle, so you
need to be able to show you understand it and take it
seriously.

Customer Obsession
The first and perhaps most important Amazon leadership
principle is “Customer Obsession.”

I recommend that everyone, no matter what role you’re

interviewing for, prepare answers for the “Customer
Obsession” questions. This is truly Amazonians’ favorite
leadership principle, so you need to be able to show you
understand it and take it seriously.

This is how Amazon explains the principle:

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They

work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although
leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over
customers.

So what does this principle mean? It means that if you’re

obsessed with customers, you will:

• Collect data on and deeply understand your

customer’s needs and wants
• Ask yourself, “Is what I’m working on helping my
customers?”
• Rigorously pursue customer feedback
• “WOW” your customers
• Provide products and solutions that exceed customer
expectations
• Remove steps in your process that don’t add value
• Treat your customers like they’re #1

What are examples of “Customer Obsession” questions in

Amazon interviews?
I’ve explained what the principle is about, so now how will
this principle show up in your interview? Will your interviewer
ask, “Are you obsessed with customers?” They might ask
about the principle in this straightforward way, but the
questions are typically more subtle than that. Here are some
of the ways you may be asked about this specific principle:

• When you’re working with a large number of

customers, it’s tricky to deliver excellent service to all
of them. How do you prioritize the different customer
needs?
• Tell me about a time you handled a difficult
customer. What did you do? How did you manage
the customer? What was her or his reaction? What
was the outcome?
• Most of us at one time have felt frustrated or
impatient when dealing with customers. Can you tell
me about a time when you felt this way, and how you
dealt with it? What was the outcome?
• When was a time when you had to balance the
needs of the customer with the needs of the
business? How did you approach the situation? What
were your actions? What was the end result?
• Give me an example of a change you implemented
in your current team or organization to meet the
needs of your customers. What has been the result?
• Tell me about a time a customer wanted one thing,
but you felt they needed something else. What was
the situation and what was the action you took?
• Tell me about a time you used customer feedback to
change the way you worked. Why did you take the
action you did? What was the outcome?
• Tell me about a time you had to compromise in order
to satisfy a customer.
• How do you get to an understanding of what the
customer’s needs are?
• How do you develop client relationships?
• How do you anticipate your customers’ needs?
• How do you “wow” your customers?
• When do you think it’s ok to push back or say no to an
unreasonable customer request?
These questions do not use the phrase “Customer
Obsession,” but they’re asking about the idea behind the
principle, which is caring about customers and how you
make customer experience a priority.
How to answer “Customer Obsession” questions
You need to tell a story, which you can structure using the
PAR technique (Problem/Action/Result). I cover this structure
earlier in the book.

As with the other principles, use a story from your past work
experience to answer the “Customer Obsession” questions,
even if you get asked “How do you wow your customers?”
or another question beginning with “how.” “How” questions
tend to confuse people because they seem like the
interviewer is asking you to answer more generally. In fact, to
give a strong answer, you need to talk about something
specific. Answer this and other “how” questions with
something like, “I try to go above and beyond to serve my
customers” [general statement about how you approach
dealing with customers]. For example, once last year I had
to…” [a specific story]. In other words, don’t give just a
general answer that describes your personality or work
habits. Be sure to include a specific example about
something that happened to you at work that involves
helping the customer.

Interviewees sometimes miss how their actions relate to the

customer experience. Even if you aren’t in a customer-
facing role like sales, you still work for the person who clicks
“Buy.” In your interview answers, show that you understand
your customers and their needs. You don’t want to sound
like someone who just does the tasks assigned to you as part
of your job. In your “Customer Obsession” stories, show how
your actions have an impact on the customer experience,
directly or indirectly.

You want to show you’re not so focused on doing what

you’re told that you never take a step back to understand
who uses the product or service. Yes, your boss or another
stakeholder might be considered your “customer” because
you have to make them happy, but in the end, the
customer who pays for your products or services keeps your
company in business.

Avoid clichés such as “the customer is always right.”

Showing “Customer Obsession” doesn’t mean you always
do exactly what the customer asks. True “Customer
Obsession” is about understanding the problem behind a
customer request. Solving that problem might include
something the customer never even imagined.

For inspiration, consider reading about Jeff Bezos’s obsession

with customers. A quick Google search on the topic will
return many examples. I like this article on Inc., which quotes
Bezos as saying, “What matters to me is, do we provide the
best customer service. Internet shminternet. That doesn’t
matter.” Note how, in that interview, Bezos connects
opening new warehouses and hiring new employees back
to servicing customers. Everything Amazon does is about the
customer.

Sample answers for “Customer Obsession” questions

Question: Tell me about a time you handled a difficult
customer. What did you do? How did you manage the
customer? What was her/his reaction? What was the
outcome?

Here is an answer given by a Sales Manager:

“When I was a Sales Manager at X, we had a group of

unhappy customers. We’d sold them a weed killer that
hadn’t worked well. As farmers, they relied on the weed
killer, and they were threatening to take their business to our
competitor. I had to try to keep them as customers. I knew
retaining them would be hard because our product had
been defective and had cost them money. I had a meeting
with all of them where I listened to their complaints. I listened
to each of them and responded calmly. I explained to them
what had happened, which was definitely our fault, and
apologized. In the end, they agreed to give us one more
chance, even though I couldn’t offer them a refund, since I
didn’t have the ability to do that.”

This answer uses the PAR structure and is therefore easy to

follow, but it’s lacking in detail. In general, you want your
answers to be about two minutes long. This answer is about
half that. Let’s revise it. We’ll keep the PAR structure, but
we’ll add some more detail to demonstrate the candidate’s
“Customer Obsession.” We can also emphasize skills that will
be relevant to the job she is applying for – dealing with
unhappy clients, client communication, and conflict
management.

Here’s the revised version:

Problem: When I was a Sales Manager at X, we had a

group of unhappy customers. We’d sold them a
weed killer that hadn’t worked as advertised. The
product worked, but not as well as we said it would.
As farmers, they relied on the weed killer, and they
were threatening to take their business to our
competitor. I had to try to keep them as customers. I
knew retaining them would be hard because our
product had failed to deliver and had cost them
money.
Action: Relationships were especially important to
these customers, and the primary component of a
customer relationship, in my experience, is trust. By
selling them a faulty product, I had betrayed that
trust. Repairing it would not be simple and would
require a lot of time, time that I would otherwise be
using to sell to other customers. But I thought the time
would be worth it, because my reputation was on the
line, not to mention the reputation of the company I
worked for.

Restoring trust is about admitting you were wrong

and, above all, listening. I had a series of meetings
with the farmers, where my only goal was to listen.
Not to try to sell to them. Not to promise we’d do
better. Just listen. I first met with them as a group, and
then I met separately with several of them. I listened
to each of them and responded calmly. I explained
to them what had happened, which was definitely
our fault, and apologized. In the course of our
conversations, the farmers became less frustrated
with the situation and were ready to look ahead.

Result: While I didn’t have the ability to give them a

refund for the defective product, in the end, they
agreed to give us one more chance. I knew that I still
needed to deliver a quality product to completely
restore trust, but not losing them as customers was a
major victory.

I’ve added a few things to this revised version of the story.

First, there is more detail about the problem, i.e., the product
had not worked as well as advertised. Second, the Action
section needed a lot of work. It was too short. The Action
section should typically be the longest part of your answer,
and it’s your place to show your skills. In this revised version of
the story, the Sales Manager shows that she understands
what’s important to the customer (relationships), and she
devises a strategy around that. She implies that fixing the
customer relationship will cost her money in the immediate
term (“time that I would otherwise be using to sell to other
customers”), but she does it anyway because she’s thinking
about the longer-term implications. This revised version is
much better than the original.

Question: How do you get an understanding of what the

customer’s needs are?

Here is an answer given by a Senior Digital Product

Manager:

“I use quantitative and qualitative approaches. Quantitative

is looking at data to derive insights. Data can be what are
customers doing when they use your product and, if you’re
working on a digital product, you could use an approach
like web analytics. With qualitative approaches, you can
simply ask them about their needs about how they use your
product, but a better way is to immerse yourself into their
problem space and ask where does the product fit into their
daily life today? For example, in looking at my top
customers, in terms of the customers most engaged on my
platform, I can see that content about IT certification is very
popular. As a result, we started doing online trainings and
certifications. So instead of just a course or video, we do live
trainings now. Those turned out to be really popular. So it
seems that anything we give them in terms of IT certification
is really popular. So I’ve started to talk to customers about
the role of certification in their workplace. It turns out that
getting certified is important because it’s tied to getting
promoted.”

This answer could be improved. How could you make it

better? Let’s break it down into P-A-R first.

“I use quantitative and qualitative approaches. Quantitative

is looking at data to derive insights. Data can be what are
customers doing when they use your product and, if you’re
working on a digital product, you could use an approach
like web analytics. Qualitative approaches you can simply
ask them about their needs about how they use your
product, but a better way is to immerse yourself into their
problem space and ask where does the product fit into their
daily life today?”

This is the first part of the story, but it is not actually the
Problem/Situation. It’s what I call “general stuff” or “extra
stuff we don’t need.” Many people add this type of info at
the start of answers – but it isn’t actually “Problem” stuff. It’s
not really giving you the situation.

How could you fix this?

P: I use both quantitative and qualitative methods to

find out what my customers need. [I kept one
sentence of the general stuff as a lead in – you could
use more, but don’t ramble on.] For example, last
month I wanted to find out what type of content was
most popular on our site so we could do more of it.

A: I looked at data on my top customers, in terms of

the customers most engaged on my platform, and I
could see that content about IT certification is very
popular. So I started to talk to customers about the
role of certification in their workplace. It turns out that
getting certified is important because it’s tied to
getting promoted. As a result we started doing online
trainings for the certifications. So instead of just a
course or video, we do live trainings now as part of
the educational product line up.

R: Those trainings turned out to be popular. So it

seems that anything we give them in terms of IT
certification is really popular.

I’ve eliminated the extra stuff in the first section that wasn’t
really related to the situation. You can see how applying the
P-A-R technique and eliminating what didn’t fit into that
structure resulted in a much clearer answer.

Is this a great answer now? No, it’s just average. You could
actually improve this answer further by adding more details
and/or data in each of the three sections. Although the first
revision helped, the improved version was still a little light on
concrete data. Any kind of details or numbers you have will
make your answer sound more believable. This version is
even better:

P: I’m currently working at X, and we have a site that

is a learning platform primarily for enterprise
customers. I use both quantitative and qualitative
methods to find out what the customers want and
need. For example, earlier this year, I wanted to find
out what type of content was most popular on our
site so we could do more of it.

A: I looked at data on my top customers, in terms of

the customers most engaged on my platform, and I
could see that content about IT certification was very
popular. I wanted to dig deeper on this topic. So I
started to talk to customers about the role of
certification in their workplace. It turns out that
getting certified is important because it’s tied to
career growth, most specifically getting promoted. I
also asked them what certifications they wanted the
most.

Based on this research, we decided to increase our

product offerings in this area. We already had courses
and videos about certifications, but we added
webinars to the educational product lineup because
different formats appeal to a wider audience. To
reach more users, we needed to diversify how the
material was presented. We also increased the
number and type of certifications we offered in areas
where we saw the most interest – cloud-related
technologies and security, for example.

R: Those trainings turned out to be popular. The

average user now spends 23% more time per month
on our learning platform, most of which can be
attributed to our new IT certification-related materials.

Here’s another example for that question given by someone

from a different role.

Question: How do you figure out what a customer needs?

Answer given by a UX Designer:

“When I joined the team at X to work on their cloud product,

I found out that there had been no customer research done
prior to release of the first version of the product. It had been
primarily designed based on conversations with sales
engineers. A quick usability tests proved my suspicions –
customers found the product frustrating to use. One
customer called the product a “chore to use”; another said
it was “exhausting.”

I met with the customer success team to get a list of

customers who had purchased this product. I then proposed
a face-to-face user research meeting with them so I could
understand these customers and get feedback on the
version they were using. Before I visited, I created a test plan
of questions I intended to ask and circulated it to the
working team so that I could include questions they
intended to ask.

I visited four customers and interviewed seven end users who

were the primary users of this product. My selection criteria
were as follows:

• Users who were using the cloud product currently (5)

• Users who had used it before and are no longer using

it (5)

What I learned from my research was that there were two

distinct personas who were intended to use it, the Manager
persona and the Executive persona. The Manager wanted
to have a much more detailed view into their subscriber
activity and the Executive wanted to get a very high-level
view. Apart from personas, I also learned that there were
three focus areas of how the marketing teams worked
(acquisition, upsell, and retention).

I synthesized this research and created a customer needs

matrix, which acted as a key input to the product
management prioritization roadmap. Our NPS score
improved by 20 points as a result of this work.”

This story is good because it uses a clear structure and has a

good story that answers the question. He is professional,
straightforward, and direct. He weaves into his story phrases
that make him sound like a subject matter expert – “usability
tests,” “user research meeting,” “test plan,” “end users,” and
“personas.” He shows that he knows how to apply his craft to
taking care of customers – “Customer Obsession.”

Question: How do you show customer obsession?

A Senior Digital Marketer’s answer:

“An example of how I regard customers is from when I had

just become the Regional Manager at X bank in India in
2015. We were having problems retaining customers
because our online services, in particular the online banking
app, weren’t as sophisticated as our in-person services were
even though more of our customers were wanting to bank
online. I realized this couldn’t continue and began a push to
revamp the app along with the IT department. It took us a
year of product development but in the end we rolled out
the new online banking app and service plan and it was
well received. This and effort from other departments helped
the organization notch customer engagement of 75 from 55
percent earlier over the next two years. We improved the
region’s profitability by 15 percent.”

This is a good answer because he describes a specific

problem and how he solved it. He also includes the results,
which demonstrate that his solution was good for both the
customer and the business.
The Action section is light on details though, which is a
problem many candidates struggle with when forming
stories. This story would be better if he had said what the
problems were with the online app specifically and what
was included in the new app that hadn’t been there before
and why those features were chosen. The Action section is
the part of the story where you show how you made a
difference. When you come up with your own stories, make
sure you put in enough details.

I like the data that this candidate includes in his Results

section. It’s good if you can add data to your answers, both
technical data and/or financial data. The data helps your
answer sound like it was a real situation and also makes it
sound like you have a high level of expertise. In other words,
using data makes you sound smarter and more competent
than if you don’t talk about data, so it’s good to have data
in any answer.

Question: Tell me about a time where you put the customer

first, regardless of what peers or management directed.
What was the outcome? How did this impact day-to-day
interaction with your peers and/or management.

Answer given by a Cloud Architect, broken into the PAR

structure:

P: I worked with a mid-market client at X Co., when

they were just making the transition to Azure cloud.
Initially, they were just interested in lifting and shifting
one of their web apps to the cloud for testing and
development. They had paid less than $10K, making it
a relatively small account. Management didn’t want
me spending too much time getting them
onboarded, but it was a relatively complex job and I
wanted it done right.

A: I understood management’s concerns, but I had

done the architectural assessment and knew the
client needs. My primary concern was doing right by
the customer, but if I’m being completely honest, I
saw significant upside opportunities. For one, while we
had been contracted to migrate just the one web
app to the cloud, the client in fact had a whole suite
of apps that could eventually be migrated, if the first
migration went well. Secondly, the client was well
connected and would provide a reference for other
work.

To convince management that this job was worth

more time than usual for such a small account, I
walked them through the hidden upsides. Since I had
been working closely with the client I asked if I could
spend time on this project until after go-live. My
manager agreed, and I spent more time working on
the project.

R: As a result of my close work with the client, the lift

and shift was finished ahead of schedule. I wrote a
proposal for the client to work on the other apps,
which we ended up moving ahead with, and
ultimately, the total contract value of the account
surpassed six figures. That job influenced how we
operated going forward, and fundamentally
changed the role of Solution Architect at my
company. The job was no longer just about meeting
the exact requirements of the contract. We began
engaging with customer needs more holistically,
always seeking to deepen the relationship.

There is a lot to like about this story. The Solutions Architect

shows that he can turn “Customer Obsession” into revenue
opportunities. He also demonstrates that he’s willing to fight
for his ideas, which speaks to one of the other leadership
principles (“Have Backbone”).

Ownership
The second Amazon leadership principle is “Ownership.”

Here’s how Amazon explains the principle:

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice
long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of
the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never
say “that’s not my job.”

If you’re not clear on what this definition of “Ownership”

means exactly, here are some other ways of understanding
it. If you show ownership, you will:

• Ignore boundaries between jobs and departments if

necessary to get your project done. If you see a
problem and it’s not in your department, you will try
to fix it.
• Along the same lines, you will manage every
dependency and won’t make excuses if something
goes wrong. You won’t say, “That wasn’t my job to
take care of.”
• Think about the impact of your decisions on other
teams, sites, and the customer over time.
• Consider future outcomes (scalable, long-term value,
and so on).
• Coach and mentor your team to understand the big
picture, how their role supports the overall objectives
of Amazon, and how it ties to others.
Your interviewer may ask you to demonstrate your ownership
skills. In the following section, let’s review the top five
questions related to “Ownership,” based on my experience
with clients.

Top five Amazon interview questions related to “Ownership”

1. Provide an example of when you personally
demonstrated ownership.
2. Tell me about a time you went above and beyond.
What actions did you take? Why did you take those
actions? What was the outcome?
3. Tell me about a time when you took on something
significant outside your area of responsibility. Why was
it important? What was the outcome?
4. Describe a project or idea (not necessarily your own)
that was implemented primarily because of your
efforts. What was your role? What was the outcome?
5. Give an example of when you saw a peer struggling
and decided to step in and help. What was the
situation and what actions did you take? What was
the outcome?

Sample answers for the top five “Ownership” questions

Question: Provide an example of when you personally
demonstrated ownership.
Here’s a Senior Product Marketing Manager’s answer:

“When I was leading the Marketing Services team, we were

told to have digital media investments as twenty percent of
the product’s fixed marketing expenses in two years. At the
time, the digital share was only five percent of expenses,
with display and banner ads and some YouTube videos.

The business teams were the key responsible people for

budget management and allocation. My role was to give
them direction on the most effective way to spend based
on the communication strategy. Both marketing teams and
the media agencies were hesitant to make such a big shift
in a short period because the ROI wasn’t known. My task
was to convince the business leaders to invest more on
digital campaigns.

I led four major initiatives. First, I collaborated with digital

platform owners on Facebook, Twitter, and Google to give
training on digital and social media to the marketers and
build key campaigns together and used their data
combining with brand metrics to evaluate performance.
Then I started reverse mentoring in the company. Younger
team members showed us how they were interacting with
brands and what they liked doing in social media. This
increased our organizational competency for digital. I also
asked our creative and media agencies to include more
digital talent. Last, I restructured the marketing KPIs and
brand health tracking to incorporate the evaluation of
digital campaigns. This enabled us to learn what drives ROI.

At the end of the second year, more than twenty percent of

the budget was being invested in digital. One campaign
won the Facebook Cannes award and the other won the
Twitter Aviator award.”

This story follows the PAR structure, demonstrates ownership,

is about the right length, and is easy to follow. For those
reasons, it’s a good story. How could we make it even
better? I think this story would be stronger if it had better
focus. The candidate telling the story says that her task is to
convince business leaders to invest more. When I read this
story, it sounds like she was successful in convincing them
when she “restructured the marketing KPIs and brand health
tracking” to “learn what drives ROI.” However, she provides
little detail on that topic and instead talks about other
initiatives that were not directly connected to persuading
the business leaders. My advice in this case would be to
focus more on the main problem (convincing business
leaders) and how the candidate solved it (demonstrating
ROI).

Let’s look at another example.

Question 2. Tell me about a time you went “above and

beyond.” What actions did you take? Why did you take
those actions? What was the outcome?

Here’s one Software Developer’s answer:

“While working on my most recent project, our customer

asked to add a new feature to the product. While it was a
reasonable request, it went beyond the scope of the project
we had worked out, and there was no time built into the
schedule for it. My manager decided that we couldn’t
refuse and insisted that we rework the schedule. This change
increased my workload about 25 percent in the same
timeframe. I did my best to complete the extra work in the
time given by working later at night and also working some
of the weekends. Although it wasn’t an ideal situation, we
managed to pull it off and the customer was satisfied with
our work.”

This developer should add details about the company she

was working for, the type of product, the feature, and the
work she was doing to make for a stronger answer. Why did
the manager insist on doing the work? Who was the
customer? Details help make the story sound more real.

Also, “above and beyond” means doing more than what is

required, so in other words if you do something extra it will be
something that isn’t already in your job description. Weren’t
the things she’s talking about here just her normal everyday
job? How are they outside her normal work? I don’t think
they are really, so I don’t think this would be a good choice
to answer this particular question. She could use this for
doing something quickly or helping a customer.

Question 3. Tell me about a time when you took on

something significant outside your area of responsibility. Why
was it important? What was the outcome?

This is an Operation Manager’s answer:

“As a part of a company rebranding, we were moving our

site to a new domain. The old domain had gained
significant domain authority over the years and, at the time,
was generating trials worth $4.50 each, and we were getting
approximately 1,000 per day. The goal was to complete the
migration while protecting that line of revenue.

I didn’t see anyone treating this project with the sense of

urgency or risk mitigation that I thought it needed, so I took
over coordinating it, although it would have normally fallen
to the marketing team to lead this effort. While I wasn’t an
expert, I had researched best practices around a site
migration. I was convinced that the key was to migrate the
content pages, set up 301 redirects, and have Google re-
index the site as quickly as possible. It was inevitable that
we’d lose some revenue during the migration, but I knew we
could minimize it with decisive action and SEO best
practices.

I led the team through the implementation, while carefully

monitoring the organic traffic data during the migration. We
completed the migration as planned. While we initially saw
a decline in organic traffic (as expected), it recovered
quickly. We had successfully migrated to the new domain
and still met our B2C budget numbers.”

This is a solid answer. The Operations Manager saw an

opportunity to help with an important company initiative
and showed leadership by taking on a project that was
outside of his department.

This is a similar question to the “above and beyond” one, but

this is something that is clearly outside of this person’s normal
area of work and so it answers the question better than the
developer did.

Question 4. Describe a project or idea (not necessarily your

own) that was implemented primarily because of your
efforts. What was your role? What was the outcome?

Digital Marketing Manager’s answer:

“Last year we weren’t getting high enough conversion rates

on some of our pages for our newest product. They were
well below our goal. I was managing the team whose goal
was to fix this. I coordinated our landing page optimization
efforts and we updated the user interface on 10+ landing
pages in less than three months. We saw conversion lifts
between 25 and 45 percent.”

The structure of the answer is solid but it’s missing details and
so is too short. This person could add explanation for what
the products were, what the pages that weren’t converting
were, and more details about how she fixed the problem.

What skills should a person in this role have? Add details that
show you have those skills in particular when expanding your
story.

Question 5. Give an example of when you saw a peer

struggling and decided to step in and help. What was the
situation and what actions did you take? What was the
outcome?

Senior Business Development Manager’s answer:

“At my current job, a recent product launch opened up an

opportunity to enter into the financial sector, a new market
for us. I had come from this world and knew it intimately. In
truth, I was the best qualified person to plan how we would
penetrate the market, but I was deep into closing a major
deal and didn’t have the bandwidth. My colleague
stepped up and was preparing a plan. When he asked for
my advice, I saw that he was missing some of the key
players in the space and would struggle to penetrate the
market.

It wasn’t as simple as me telling him who he needed to talk

to. In order to be successful, he needed to approach it in a
specific way. The incumbents are very entrenched in the
financial sector, and it’s more about the relationships than
the products themselves. It was a lot to talk through. I asked
him if he was free for dinner, and we worked together on his
plan through dinner and well into the evening. I laid out for
him who specifically he needed to approach, and how to
manage the relationships. I also mentored him on having
patience as these deals would take time to develop but
would be worth it in the end.

He closed his first deal with a bank in Germany five months

later, which would lead to a string of opportunities. We
expanded the team, and the financial sector became a
major line of business for us.”

I wish that this story had more data, but it’s a compelling
story and the BizDev Manager shows maturity and
leadership in his answer.

Invent and Simplify

The third Amazon leadership principle is “Invent and
Simplify.”

Here’s how Amazon explains the Invent and Simplify

principle:

Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from

their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are
externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and
are not limited by “not invented here." As we do new things,
we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods
of time.
The “invent” part of this principle is that Amazon frequently
does new things, whether “new” means new scale, new
products, new platforms, or something else new.

The “simplify” part of this principle is the idea that everyone,

no matter what type of job they have, has the opportunity
to simplify something, usually a process. Making something
simpler is desirable because simpler usually equals greater
efficiency, i.e., quicker or cheaper, and what company
wouldn’t like that?

My clients sometimes worry that, if they’re not inventing new

products or new technologies as part of their job, they won’t
be able to answer questions about the Invent and Simplify
principle. But that’s not true. You don’t have to be
“inventing” things to do well on this principle. Anyone in any
type of role can have an impact on a process.

So besides wanting to know if you’ve invented or simplified,

what is your interviewer looking for when she asks you to
speak to this principle? Amazon wants people who are
curious and well informed and can be creative in thinking of
solutions. They want people who can easily generate
multiple ideas for problem solving. They want people who
know how to find answers by looking into how other
departments or other industries do things. Above all, they
want people who will try to improve things, not just accept
the status quo blindly.

Top five Amazon interview questions asking about “Invent

and Simplify”
There are different questions your interviewer can use to ask
about your “invent and simplify” skills. Based on my
experience with clients, here are the top five questions:
1. Tell me about a time when you invented something.
2. What improvements have you made at your current
company?
3. Tell me about a time when you gave a simple solution
to a complex problem.
4. Tell me about a time you had to think outside the box
(think creatively) to close a sale or sell your product.
5. What is the most innovative project you’ve worked
on.
Question: “What improvements have you made at your
current company?”

Answer given by a Data Engineer:

“We were using an Enterprise Service Bus in our project for

SOA, and one of the functions we use it for is to record the
time when a web service request arrives at our platform and
when the response leaves the platform. Logging this
information helps us measure response-time performance
analysis for each web service. The response-time data were
stored in a database which has grown very big as the
platform has expanded over the years.

We needed to keep the growth of the database in check.

Per project requirements, it was also necessary to keep data
available for three months online and one year in an offline
storage.

I developed a tool that met and automated the

requirements. Once the user configures the tool, it
automatically finds the table partitions in scope, backs up
those partitions, zips up the backup, and then moves the
backup to tapes. As the final step, it generates SQL script
files to clean up the partitions that it had backed up.

As a result of this automation, we saved at least one to two

days of effort per month. We are also using this tool to clean
up the logs for provisioning history from customer records.”

Stories related to automation are well suited for “Invent and

Simplify” questions. Note how this Data Engineer includes the
results of his work – “two days of effort per month.” In your
own stories related to “Invent and Simplify,” follow this
example and include specific business outcomes.

Question: “Tell me about a time you had to think outside the

box.”

The phrase “outside the box” means “not the usual way of
looking at things.” If your interviewer asks you this question,
you need to provide evidence that you question
assumptions.

Here’s a story from a Product Manager who does a nice job

of thinking “outside of the box”:

“We had a SAAS product [note: SAAS is “software as a

service”] that needed to integrate with our clients’ human
resources platforms. We had two target markets –
healthcare and academic. Both markets offered large
opportunities, but, to me, the TAM [note: TAM is “total
addressable market”] of the healthcare customers was
much more attractive.

The problem was that healthcare customers tended to use

one type of HR platform, and academic customers used all
sorts of different types. The technical team struggled with an
integration solution that would work in all situations. It
became apparent that we would need to build several
disparate solutions, not one as we had hoped, to service
both markets.

The business owner of our unit was dismissive of these

technical hurdles, but I spent time with the teams, and I
knew this complexity was going to add months and even
threaten the feasibility of the project. So I ran the numbers
and put together a presentation, demonstrating to the
business owner and several senior stakeholders that we
should focus on the healthcare market and revisit the
academic market in the following years. I had to do a lot of
convincing because, as I said, the academic opportunity
was large.

Eventually I convinced the business that we needed to

simplify our approach and focus on the larger market and
build a solution that would work for those customers.”

Note how this interviewee questions assumptions, digs into

the details, and is willing to stand up for the best solution for
the business, even when his seniors thought otherwise. The
solution presented wasn’t a small improvement to the
existing business model; it was an entirely new idea for the
company and one that wasn’t conventional wisdom of
trying to make all customers happy so you don’t lose any of
them.

This story impressed the interviewer at Amazon, and the

interviewee made it to the next round.

Let’s look at one more example for the “Invent and Simplify”
principle.
Question: Tell me about a time you invented something.

Answer given by a Senior Software Engineer:

Three days before a big release, my customer identified that

the infrastructure testing had not been completed. They
would not go ahead with the release without completing
testing. Specifically, the customer wanted to test the firewall
connectivity between servers, and they wanted to check if
the health checks were all green on the load balancers. All
APIs were already responding as expected.

I stayed at the office late that night and logged into each
box and ran a set of telnet commands to complete the
tests. It was simple but repetitive work. After doing this for
about a quarter of the 100 servers, I had had enough and
knew I had to automate the process. If I continued working
in the same way, I’d never finish in time, and my approach
was prone to human error.

Unfortunately, due to company policy, the client hadn’t

granted me the level of access I needed to create script
files on the servers and execute them. So I explored a
method using Java-based shell API Jcraft JSch. I wrote the
proof of concept in my own workspace, completed it on the
same night, and sent the results to my client contact. He was
impressed and thought the approach looked sound. Based
on that exchange, I built my POC into a tool that was used
by the entire team.

With the tool in place, productivity improved, and we were

able to complete the testing in time for the release.

When you are trying to think of stories for “Invent and

Simplify,” think back to the times in your career when you
were under constraints but still got the job done. In the story,
the Senior Software Engineer was under tremendous time
constraints, and she had limited access to the server to
automate in the way she normally would. To “Invent and
Simplify,” you must do something in a new way, either new
to you or new to your business. Try to capture that spirit of
“newness” in your own “Invent and Simplify” stories.

Are Right, A Lot

I usually get questions from my interview coaching clients
about what this principle means because it’s a hard one to
understand.

Here’s how Amazon describes this principle:

Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and

good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to
disconfirm their beliefs.

Here’s an excerpt of The Amazon Way by John Rossman, a

book you should read if you want to know more about
Amazon. Rossman explains the thinking behind this principle
better than I can. This should help you understand what the
principle means:

“Leaders at Amazon are right – not always, but a lot. They

have strong business judgment, and they spread that strong
judgment to others through the clarity with which they
define their goals and the metrics they use to measure
success.

There is a high degree of tolerance for failure at Amazon. But

Jeff Bezos cannot tolerate someone making the same
mistake over and over. Therefore, leaders at Amazon are
expected to be right far more often than they are wrong.
And when they are wrong – which of course will happen
when a company continually pushes the envelope – they
are expected to learn from their mistakes, develop specific
insights into the reasons for those mistakes, and share those
insights with the rest of the company.”

That should have helped a little, but I know the principle still
isn’t that easy to understand. I think if you keep reading the
meaning will become clearer.

Three common interview questions for “Are Right, A Lot”

I think of the principle as being about judgement, but
“judgement” is a big concept. Because it’s such a big
concept, it’s hard to pin down. How do you know if
someone has good judgement? There are many behaviors
someone might display that show their judgement or lack of
judgement. Because there are so many layers to the
judgement idea and so many behaviors one might display
that show judgement, there is no one single typical question
for this principle.

Let’s look at some ways in which an interviewer might ask

about this principle. The first way is what I call “the mistake or
failure questions.”

The mistake or failure questions

These are popular questions. The interviewer might use
different words to ask this question, such as “failure” or
“mistake” or “error in judgement” or “bad decision” or
“regret.” You can use the same example for your answer no
matter how the question is asked. Yes, you can use the same
answer for the regret question too, just make sure you
explain why you feel regret.
How to answer
1. First, admit you made a mistake.
This has to be the first part of the answer.
However, while it’s okay to admit a mistake, try to
avoid talking about messing up something that’s
business critical. If the job you’re trying to get is
manager of X and, in your example, you talk about
how you did a bad job with X yesterday, consider
another approach. Try a topic that doesn’t cast
doubt on your overall skills, or pick an example from
early in your career so you can show how you
learned to do X better afterward. Ideally, you want to
choose a story that talks about a skill a bit more
removed from your potential duties at Amazon. Or
you want to pick an example from early in your
career so you can show how different you are now
because you’ve learned.
2. Quantify your mistake, if possible.
Talk about how much revenue was lost or how much
time was lost due to your error. What effects did your
mistake cause?
3. Talk about what you learned from your mistake.
The “learning” part of the answer is absolutely
necessary.
4. Link your learnings to a recent success.
You learned something from your mistake and then
you applied this new improved knowledge to your
future projects. Give an example of where you had a
successful outcome directly as a result of this new
knowledge.

How not to answer

1. Don’t be overly hard on yourself. Yes, admit you
made a mistake. But don’t talk about how you can’t
believe you did this and you’re so sorry and you know
how stupid it was, etc. Everyone makes mistakes and
it’s necessary to be calm and straightforward when
talking about them.
2. Don’t say you’ve never made a mistake. This shows
that you’re dishonest or don’t realize when you make
mistakes. Dishonesty and lack of self-awareness are
ways you fail this question.
3. Don’t say that your biggest failure is something very
small like that you forgot to turn in your benefits forms,
etc. This is a common thing that people do when
they’re not used to being open about their failures.
And don’t do the reverse psychology tactic where
you say, “My biggest failure is that I work too hard.” If
you have an experienced interviewer they will be
secretly rolling their eyes at you for this.

Sample answers for “Are Right, A Lot” questions: Mistake or

failure
Question: Tell me about a time you failed.

Answer given by a Big Data Consultant:

“I worked for a company’s big data practice as a senior big

data consultant for enterprise. One of our clients, X
Communications, the second largest U.S. cable operator,
wanted to build two hundred nodes using Hortonworks
Hadoop clusters. This was an important client for us. I worked
with the client’s big data manager on an analysis and
determined the level of effort to be sixty days with four
Hadoop admin resources to complete the build.

Unfortunately, I missed the project deadline because I failed

to manage the scope creep. The project extended an extra
sixty days. It cost us one extra month of billing four Hadoop
admin resources worth a hundred thousand dollars.

During the project, the business requirements changed

repeatedly, requiring support for HBASE, Kafka, Sqoop, and
Ranger, which significantly increased the overall scope of
the project. I flagged this scope creep in our weekly status
meetings, came up with updated level of effort estimation
of another sixty days, and presented it. I also created an
updated project plan and explained the deviation from the
original sixty days to the client’s big data manager. I offered
the option of including the new requirements in a
subsequent project, but I couldn’t persuade him.

From this failure, I learned that I need to be more vocal and

have a stronger backbone. Going forward, I committed
myself to engaging with the client manager and
stakeholders in brainstorming sessions at the requirements
phase to avoid scope creep. Also, I learned I should propose
agile methodology/scrum framework for implementing this
kind of project, even when the client was unfamiliar or even
resistant.

Soon after, I managed a similar project with another client.

When the client was vague on requirements, I told them
about my experience with the X Communications project
and what it had cost us. Because of my experience and
approach, the new client listened to me and decided to go
with the agile model, which helped us to tightly manage the
scope. We were able to deliver that project on time and we
generated five hundred thousand dollars in revenue, largely
because we managed scope and delivered on time.”

The data consultant’s answer is good because it

demonstrates what he learned and he is very specific about
that. The best part of his answer is how he emphasizes how
he turned his experience from a past failure to future
success. This might be a risky answer though because
dealing with scope creep is absolutely essential in his job,
and he hasn’t done well with handling it.

Answer given by a Senior Technical Account Manager:

“This was when I was on my Company X project. One of the

applications was generating a lot of temporary files and was
not cleaning it up. We had logged a bug with the
application team. However, in the meantime, I had taken
up a task to clean up the files hourly. I developed the script
quickly as it was simple. Got it peer reviewed and put it in
PROD. Everything was working fine. The following weekend
we had a code deployment. We implemented a new tool
for deployment. The deployment completed and we
released the application for testing.

After some time, we got complaints that the testing team

was seeing errors, and no one was able to get to the
application. I tried myself and I was not. Upon checking I
found out that the ear file I deployed was missing. I knew I
had deployed it and checked before releasing. So, I could
not understand what happened. I checked with my
coworkers and no one had done anything. So, I quickly
redeployed, checked, and released for testing. I also kept
working in the background to find the root cause. In some
time, the issue resurfaced, and I saw the same behavior. The
files were missing. Then I realized maybe some process is
removing the files. Also, I noticed a pattern that the
complaints came at the top of the hour. So, it struck me that
it may be from my script. I checked the script logs and found
out that it was the case. I quickly removed the script. Then
upon analysis I found that the new tool that we had used
had created a symlink in the path of the application. This
caused the find command to fail and the xargs that was
piped to it and running rm picked up the wrong files and
created them.

I conveyed this to my manager. I also gave him all of the

technical details. I fixed the script and manually tested it a
few times and put it back. This was very embarrassing for me
as I had wasted two hours of downtime.

The mistake I made was not to have a check for when the
find command fails. I did not build error handling on that. So,
this incident made a large impact on my future scripts. Now I
make my scripts donkey proof at each step. It adds a few
lines in the code and some extra executions, but I rather be
safe than sorry.”

Her answer is good because she does admit the mistake

and say how she learned from it, but it would be better if she
mentioned the mistake earlier. She doesn’t get to it until the
last paragraph, so the earlier part of the story is full of
technical details with not much space given to analyzing
her behavior and mistake.
Interpersonal conflict questions
I think of these as questions dealing with your interpersonal
skills. Often they will involve conflicts. How you act in the
middle of a conflict is a good indicator of how you relate to
people. These questions are often similar or identical to the
ones you’ll get asked in the Have Backbone principle
questions.

How to answer
Show you’re (1) a nice person but (2) you can be firm if your
opinions are challenged and know how to be firm enough
to achieve your goal. A good answer will show both (1) and
(2). Unfortunately, a lot of people focus only on (2), so they
show how they met their goal but also show that they were
difficult to work with. I think most people don’t realize they’re
showing the interviewer that they’re difficult to work with or
have difficulty with interpersonal relationships.

Do interpersonal relationships really matter? Well, Amazon

fosters a culture of assertiveness (some call it “sharp
elbows”). In a culture like this it can be hard to meet your
goals while also maintaining good relationships, but if you
destroy your relationships you will probably ultimately not be
able to achieve your goals because your goals often involve
working with other people. This is really the reason you need
to show you can “get along with” others, because someone
who can’t will ultimately not be successful at Amazon
because no one will want to help them.

A good way to show that you’re nice is to show that you

can be calm and have rational discussions if you’re
challenged. Talk about how you had a discussion with the
person you disagreed with.
Besides showing you’re nice, you also have to show that
you’re capable of achieving your goal. If you have an
opinion on something but someone doesn’t agree, do you
agree with them to end the conflict? Or do you discuss the
issue until you can convince them you’re right (if you are)?
Show that you can use data to prove that your opinion is the
right one. Showing data about your side of the argument is
the perfect way to “win” the conflict in a respectful way.

Sample answers for “Are Right, A Lot” questions: The

interpersonal conflict questions
Question: Tell me about a time you disagreed with a
colleague (or a boss). What is the process you used to work
it out?

Answer given by a Director of Software Development:

“I recently had a disagreement with my team about

whether a specific functionality should be rolled out in
production. The early testing we did showed a potential
negative impact on website performance that could result
in a drop in user engagement and usage of a $5B USD
product. Emotions were high and the opinions were strong.

The first thing that I did was to draw a line of sight for my
team about how this functionality was critical to the long-
term strategy of the company and the potential upside if we
got it right. Then I agreed with my team about key business
metrics that we would monitor in production. This included
full text access and FTAs/session. If we didn’t see a
meaningful impact then we would know that the new
functionality is safe and would not impact our business
negatively.
We agreed to roll this out in an A/B test fashion first to 5% of
the traffic and then slowly ramping up to 50%. We would run
this for a few weeks and go to 100% when we’d achieved
statistical significance. At any given time if we saw a
problem we could ramp down to 0%.

I got an agreement from my team on this approach and

everyone was reasonably happy to try out this way. We are
currently at 75% and hopeful that we will be 100% within two
weeks.”

This answer is average. The conflict is with a team, not one

person, so it doesn’t convey any actual conflict or “drama.”
She says “Emotions were high” but that is a vague
statement, not a description of the disagreement. What
were some specifics of the disagreement?

A better story would be a conflict with one person. She

would talk about what that person thought and what she
thought, what the other person said and what she said in
response. She would talk about how she showed the other
person data in order to convince them that her idea was
better. I know you normally wouldn’t talk about those kind of
small details – what you each said – but in these conflict
questions you should do that.

The judgement or data questions

These are questions asking about how you make decisions
(how do you collect data you can use to decide, do you
have good judgement, etc.).

How to answer
Just describe what process you used. Be specific. Did you
throw darts at the wall to choose what to do? Probably not.
What did you do instead? How do you usually solve
problems or make decisions? This isn’t a trick question.

Don’t skim over the actual research process. Say where you
got information, even if you think this information is too basic
or boring. Don’t just say that you “got the information from
the database.” What information? What database?

They want to know if you have good intuition, and how you
put that intuition to work. Intuition is partly using your past
experience to make decisions, so you can talk about that
past experience and how it informed this decision.

They also want to know how you make decisions. What is

your general process? Talk about that.

Sample answers for “Are Right, A Lot” questions: Judgement

or data questions
Question: Give me an example of when you had to make
an important decision in the absence of good data. What
was the situation and how did you arrive at your decision?
Did the decision turn out to be the correct one? Why or why
not?

Answer given by a Consultant:

“I was working in the Private Equity Group at X. The practice

conducts commercial due diligence for private equity,
which means that we pressure test the target company’s
market growth, competitive dynamics, and profit upset
before the firm acquires it. The due diligence timeline is
usually short, between one and eight weeks. I worked on a
project investigating a trustee services provider in AU and
NZ. I had about three days to form a recommendation on
whether the NZ market represented a major opportunity for
this target.

Based on my past experience, this question translated into 4

points of data needs. I typically go through a consistent
approach to data gathering. After step one of the data
gathering, I already knew there were significant data gaps
in the securitization segment as well as the market share
data for the managed funds segments.

The securitization segment was only $30B. It would not

change the final answer. I was happy to make a business
decision to not pursue it further. But I needed to figure out
the market share piece, so I called the experts regarding
market share of the managed funds segment. I also
gathered reports on the largest funds in NZ and went
through their product disclosure statements. I also arranged
expert calls with the largest funds to understand whether
their choice is likely to change in the future.

Based on the outcome of my research, we formed the view

that the NZ market was not exciting. The client was very
pleased with our work as it answered their most strategic
questions and presented data they had never seen before.”

There are more details this person could have added. What
are all types of data needs? What is the typical approach to
data gathering? What is more background on why she was
doing those steps?

Other possible interview questions for this principle

• Describe a situation where you thought you were
right, but your peers or supervisor didn’t agree with
you. How did you convince them you were right?
How did you react? What was the outcome?
• Tell me about a time that you strongly disagreed with
your manager on something you deemed to be very
important to the business. What was it about and how
did you handle it?
• Tell me about a time where someone openly
challenged you. How did you handle this feedback?
• Give me an example of when you took an unpopular
stance in a meeting with peers and your leader and
you were the outlier. What was it, why did you feel
strongly about it, and what did you do?
• When do you decide to go along with the group
decision even if you disagree? Give me an example
of a time you chose to acquiesce to the group even
when you disagreed. Would you make the same
decision now?
• Tell me about a decision for which data and analysis
weren’t enough to provide the right course and you
had to rely on your judgment and instincts. Give me
two to three examples.
• Tell me about a time you made a difficult decision
and how you knew it was the right solution (how you
evaluated the options, if you received input, what
data you reviewed, etc.)
• Give me an example of when you had to make an
important decision in the absence of good data
because there just wasn’t any. What was the situation
and how did you arrive at your decision? Did the
decision turn out to be the correct one? Why or why
not?
• Tell me about a time you had to fix something but
had no data or direction.
• Tell me about a time when you were faced with a
challenge where the best way forward or strategy to
adopt was not “clear cut” (i.e., there were a number
of possible solutions). How did you decide the best
way forward?

Learn and Be Curious

The fifth Amazon leadership principle is “Learn and Be
Curious.”

Let’s look at how Amazon explains the principle:

Leaders are never done learning and always seek to

improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities
and act to explore them.

This is an easy principle to understand. It’s asking you if you

are the kind of person who is always learning and improving.
How do you keep up with the trends and new
developments in your field? Do you try to do things a new
way even if there’s no “need” for it? Are you open to
learning new things?

What are some typical interview questions that require you

to address the “Learn and Be Curious” principle:

• How do you find the time to stay inspired, acquire

new knowledge, or innovate in your work?
• How do you keep up with best practices?
• How do you keep up with industry trends and what
your competitors are doing?
• What have you learned that has helped you in your
job?
• What is the coolest thing you’ve learned on your own
that has helped you better perform your job?
• Tell me about a time you learned something new
from your peer or your direct report at work.
• Tell me about a time when you solved a problem
through just superior knowledge or observation.
• Tell me about a time when you influenced a change
by only asking questions.
• What is a recent book you’ve read and what did you
learn from it?
• Tell me about a project that required you to learn
something new.
• Tell me about a time you took on work outside of your
comfort area and found it rewarding.
• Tell me about a time you found you needed a
deeper level of subject matter expertise to do your
job well.
• Tell me about a time you didn’t know what to do next
or how to solve a challenging problem?
• Give me an example of a time when you challenged
the notion that that something had to be done a
certain way because it had always been done that
way.
• What are you working on to improve your overall
effectiveness at work?
• When we enter a new role or problem space, it is
common to come in and see things with a fresh
perspective. Tell me about a time when you realized
that you might have lost that fresh perspective. What
ended up happening?
• Tell me about a time you hired someone smarter than
you. (Manager)
• Tell me about a time when you challenged your team
to push the envelope and go beyond existing
standards and expectations. (Manager)
• Give me an example of a time when someone on
your team challenged you to think differently about a
problem. (Manager)

Format for answering “Learn and Be Curious” questions

Do you need to answer this question the same way you
answer other behavioral questions – in the P/A/R format?
No. Actually this question is the one exception to that rule.
Instead of P/A/R, you can just give a list of what you do, like
you’ll see in the following examples. Or you can give a
general statement first, like “I love to learn new things and
for my job I always have to keep up with the new
developments in X” and then after that give the list of what
you do.

Sample answers for “Learn and Be Curious”

Question: How do you stay inspired, acquire new
knowledge, or innovate in your work?

Answer given by a Director of Product:

“For my job I need to understand business trends, so I read
several newspapers every day, including the Wall Street
Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. I also
read magazines, including the Economist and the New
Yorker. In addition, I spend quite a bit of time reading news
on Twitter and other places online. As a Product Director for
an EdTech company, I oversee a team that produces
videos, books, and courses on tech subjects, so I also absorb
a lot of the newest information while I’m reviewing our
products and our competitors’ products.”

This answer is good, because it demonstrates that the

interviewee prioritizes learning in his daily habits, which he
ties directly back to what is useful for his job. Ultimately, the
interview is about knowing whether you can do the job, so
your answers should relate to the job duties. If you don't
need to know what is happening in politics or economics for
your job (many people don't) you wouldn't say that you
read newspapers, for example.

Answer this question by being honest about how you keep

up with new technology and new trends in your field. What
do you do? You probably read blogs, newspapers, and/or
books, or maybe you listen to podcasts or watch YouTube
videos. There are probably other things you do too – do you
take classes at a local school or online, somewhere like
Coursera or EdX? Are you enrolled in some kind of
certification program? Did you just finish a degree? I’ve also
had clients successfully answer questions about this principle
by describing a lecture series that they attended at lunch in
their offices or a conference where they met industry
leaders.
Show your interest or passion when you talk about whatever
it is you do.

Don’t tell the interviewer you don’t have the time to do any
of these things because you have a family and a job. I hear
this answer a lot from clients, and I warn them that it’s a
mistake. The interviewer will think you’re a bad candidate if
you don’t have a list of ways you’re keeping up with new
developments.

I know that we’re all busy and it’s hard to do your job all day
and then learn more in your free time. But the people you’re
competing with for the job you want are definitely spending
their free time taking classes or going to conferences or
reading, even though their lives are just as busy as yours.

Another example:

“I always try to stay up to date with the latest technology. I

go to conferences and meetups relevant to my work and
interests and read books and follow all major technical
publications. I stay current with my credentials and
certifications. I recently passed my AWS Solutions Architect
exam and am now preparing for the second set of exams. I
follow ThoughtWorks Technology Radar and I have recently
learned a lot about Micro-Frontends, and we are now
building a framework to allow all teams to build FE
applications that way.”

Notice how this candidate begins by answering the question

generally, but then gives examples, before ending her
answer with a very specific skill that she learned and
recently applied to her work. Formatting your answer in a
similar way is a good strategy.
Question: What have you learned that has helped you in
your job?

Answer given by a Senior Technical Account Manager:

“My job has made me research a lot of new technologies,

so I have learned a lot about Oracle’s Fusion Middleware
platform. I have also done quite a few automation tasks.
That gave me an understanding of CI/CD and made me
appreciate the ease and agility with which you could
complete your SDLC now compared to a few years ago.”

Answer given by a Technical Account Manager:

“I started my career as an Oracle System DBA and worked

for Oracle as a consultant. I began to see Application DBAs
as a very interesting area. Because Application DBA is
responsible for everything (DB, web server, form server,
reporting server, and so on). I discussed this with my boss,
and he sent me to an Apps DBA training class. Very quickly I
was on the projects where I was working in an apps DBA
role. I began to learn even more and I did more
implementations. I wanted to learn more and transferred to
work with one large development org in Oracle to work as
Apps DBA. After working with Oracle development, I went
back to Oracle consulting and worked on exciting
implementation projects for my consulting org’s customers.”

While both of these answers are fine, the second answer is

stronger because the candidate takes the time to explain
the impact of what he learned in specific detail.

Hire and Develop the Best

The sixth Amazon Leadership Principle is “Hire and Develop
the Best.” Let’s look at how Amazon explains the principle:
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and
promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly
move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop
leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others.

So what does the “Hire and Develop the Best” leadership

principle mean?

It means that hiring the right people, ones who can do the
job exceptionally well but who’re also interested in growing,
and then helping them learn and succeed in their job and
their overall career, is a huge aspect of a managerial or
leadership role at Amazon.

Who will get asked about this principle?

This is a principle you won’t get asked about if you’re not a
manager. If you are a manager, you should prepare an
answer that will work for each category of these questions –
hiring, managing performance, building a team, etc. You
can’t really just have one example for the entire principle,
because there are so many different activities under
managing and the stories aren’t interchangeable.

Interview questions related to this principle

If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, he or
she might ask one of the following questions:

• What is your management style?

• How do you approach managing your reports?
• What is your experience with hiring people?
• How do you ensure you hire the best people?
• Give me an example of one of the best hires of your
career. How did this person grow throughout their
career? What did you identify during the hiring
process that drove her success?
• How do you help your employees grow?
• Tell me how you help your team members develop
their careers. Can you give me two to three examples
of a specific person in whom you invested and how
you helped them develop their careers, including one
who wasn’t being successful but in whom you saw
potential and chose to invest?
• Give me an example of a time you provided
feedback to develop and leverage the strengths of
someone on your team. Were you able to positively
impact that person’s performance? What were your
most effective methods?
• How do you manage your top performers differently?
• Give me an example of someone who was promoted
one or two levels up in the organization, not just
because they were a star who would naturally rise,
but due to your coaching efforts.
• What is the composition of your current team, and
how is your team organized?
• How have you been successful at empowering either
a person or a group to accomplish a task.
• Tell me about a time when you were able to remove
a serious roadblock preventing your team from
making progress.

How to answer questions related to this principle

You’ll want to demonstrate certain skills as you answer these
questions:
• You know how to hire excellent people.
You take the interviewing process seriously. You
understand the job and identify the right job
description and candidate profile to attract the best
candidates. You focus on hiring people who will raise
the high-performance bar.
• You recognize strong performers and mentor them.
At some companies, good performers are left alone –
because they are already doing a good job – and
bad performers get all the attention – in order to
improve their performance. Amazon is what is called
a “high-performance management culture,” which
means that the company believes that top
performers need attention and guidance to ensure
that they have the opportunity to provide their best
at Amazon.
So if you currently work at a company where the
attention goes to low performers, you should reorient
yourself before you think of your answers to this. Since
Amazon believes that spending time on top
performers is one of the best uses of a leader’s time,
don’t say that you spend an equal amount of time
mentoring all of your employees, whether they’re top
performers or not.
• You try to help your people grow. You make it a
priority to coach and teach employees. You provide
regular feedback.
Of course, you want to keep the best performers on
your team, because you want good workers, but as a
leader and manager, you need to care about their
careers as well as your team performance. If you can
help an employee learn, they will at least be likely to
stay with the company as they grow, even if not on
your team.
Show that you know what each employee wants and
that you are trying to help them achieve that goal.
You help employees drive their own development
and learning by regularly discussing career goals,
strengths, and areas for development. Show that you
identify development activities and moves for all
employees.
• Diversity is a strength and will help you stand out.
Do you hire people you feel comfortable with or do
you hire the best person for the job?
Tech has a diversity problem, and if you are a white
man (which many of my clients are), you are
probably not very aware of diversity. If you’ve
created a team that isn’t all white men, consider it an
accomplishment and be prepared to speak to it.
How did you make diversity a priority? This is a
strength you can talk about.

Sample answers for “Hire and Develop”

Question: What is your experience with hiring people?

Answer by a VP of Sales:

“When I took over the sales team, the CEO told me that my
number one priority needed to be hiring. We didn’t have
enough people to meet our goals for the year. Focusing on
hiring was hard for me because I knew there were a lot of
processes that we needed to work on as a team besides
hiring, but I agreed to focus my efforts there because I knew
that the best thing I could do in the long term for the team
was to make it more resilient.

It was true that most members of the team had been

around for a while and we really needed some new faces
help execute against the new strategy. My approach first
and foremost was to tap into my own network, which is
pretty deep, and seek out the people who were the best I
had ever worked with. I specifically went after people who I
was a little intimated by because of their deep skills,
because I knew it wasn’t about me but about making the
team stronger. The second thing I did was to tap into my
team’s network. I told a key number of them that hiring
needed to be one of our top priorities, and we came up
with a process for screening and interviewing candidates.
This approach worked and became self-perpetuating
because, as new people came on board, and became
excited about what we were doing as a company they
recruited from their own network.”

This answer is good because it shows that this VP

understands the idea of hiring excellent people, in particular
how to focus on hiring people who will raise the
performance bar. She doesn’t let her ego get in the way of
hiring smart people, maybe people who are even smarter
than she is.

You can probably use a version of this answer yourself, no

matter what job you’re in, because this is a common
situation, although of course you’ll need to customize it to
your own experience.

Question: Tell me about the best hire of your career.

“The best hire I ever had was also my toughest hire. I knew
the candidate was strong, but she continued to hold out
and ask a lot of questions. She wanted to talk to other
members of the team, and she wanted to know everything
about the company. The process went on for so long I
started to question whether it was worth it. I was pretty
frustrated and wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but a
colleague gave me some great advice, convincing me that
the candidate who asks the best questions usually turns out
to be the best person for the job. I decided to remain
patient with her and when she (finally) came aboard, she hit
the ground running and soon became one of the star
performers in the company. She’s actually managing the
department for me now. I learned a lot about what talent
really looks like from the experience.”

This answer is good because it emphasizes the quality of the

person being hired. He was willing to wait and put up with
aggravation in order to get someone excellent. He could
definitely have given more details about what job he had
and what job she was going for though.

Question: Give me an example of a time you provided

feedback to develop and leverage the strengths of
someone on your team. Were you able to positively impact
that person’s performance? What were your most effective
methods?

“As I got to be a more senior manager and started hiring

managers, I was hiring people who were further into their
career. I started to see that they didn’t need as much
guidance as I had been used to giving. I realized that what
they really needed was someone to help them clear the
path so that they could succeed. I changed the way I dealt
with those type of employees; now I make it a priority to
meet with them one-on-one and let them set the agenda. I
tell them that at our meeting we will have nothing to talk
about unless they bring something to talk about. They tend
to bring things up that are blocking them. We talk about
that and either I intervene directly, or I give them advice on
how to clear the roadblocks.

On the other hand, if I that someone is on the wrong path, I

let them know right away. In the past, I would sometimes
give my team the benefit of the doubt and not share my
feedback. I learned that not helping them see what I see
was really a disservice to them. Now I give feedback early
and often, and if someone is on the wrong path, I help them
see it. Feedback is ongoing and built into the culture of the
team, not something that happens quarterly.”

This answer is good because he’s focused on developing his

strong performers, rather than spending his time on the weak
ones. Note how he emphasizes that he’s learned from his
past experience and how he’s capitalizing on that
experience for the good of his team and the company. This
is the type of person that Amazon wants to hire for a senior
manager-type role.

Insist on the Highest Standards

The seventh Amazon Leadership Principle is “Insist on the
Highest Standards.” If you’re preparing for an interview at
Amazon, you should ask yourself what Amazon means by
“highest standards” and how this principle applies to your
role at the company.

Let’s look at how Amazon explains the “Insist on the Highest

Standards” principle:
Leaders have relentlessly high standards – many people may
think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are
continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver
high-quality products, services and processes. Leaders
ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that
problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

What does this principle mean?

Having high standards means you make exceptionally high

demands of yourself and the products and services you
work on. At Amazon, standards are set through service level
agreements (SLAs). An SLA is a set of agreed upon standards
at which any service or product will perform. In an Amazon
SLA, even the worst outcome will outpace industry
standards.

Nearly everything at Amazon has an SLA, and as such,

nearly everything is measured to ensure the SLA standards
are met. In your current job, have you taken the time to
instrument your processes and services? Have you set clear
expectations of success that you can measure via that
instrumentation? If so, in your interview, be ready to tell your
story.

If you want to show your interviewer that you insist on the

highest standards, you should demonstrate that you:

• Set SLAs for everything, and don’t take shortcuts on

instrumentation.
• Continually self-critique your work to make sure the
quality is the best it can be.
• Accept and seek coaching and feedback from your
manager and others about improving the quality of
your work.
• Demand that your team delivers high-quality
products, services, and solutions.
• Coach employees about setting their own high
standards and exceeding customer expectations.

Interview questions related to “Insist on the Highest

Standards”
If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, she or
he might ask one of the following questions:

• Tell me about a time when you’ve been unsatisfied

with the status quo. What did you do to change it?
Were you successful?
• Tell me about a time you wouldn’t compromise on
achieving a great outcome when others felt
something was already good enough. What was the
situation?
• What measures have you personally put in place to
ensure performance improvement targets and
standards are achieved?
• Describe the most significant, continuous
improvement project that you’ve led. What was the
catalyst for this change and how did you go about it?
• Give me an example of a goal you’ve had where
you wish you had done better. What was the goal
and how could you have improved on it?
• Tell me about a time when you worked to improve
the quality of a product / service / solution that was
already getting good customer feedback? Why did
you think it needed more improvement?
• Give an example where you refused to compromise
your standards around quality/customer service, etc.
Why did you feel so strongly about the situation?
What were the consequences? The result?

How to answer questions related to “Insist on the Highest

Standards”
Question: Tell me about a time when you worked to improve
the quality of a product / service / solution that was already
getting good customer feedback? Why did you think it
needed more improvement?

Answer given by an Ecommerce Manager:

“When I took over the ecommerce part of the website, I

learned that the experience related to returning
merchandise was one of the worst experiences on the site. It
was difficult to navigate, and when I asked why it was so
bad, the answer I got from senior management alarmed
me. They didn’t want the experience to be easy because
they didn’t want people to return things. This felt intuitively
wrong to me, but I knew I needed the numbers to prove it. I
began collecting data relating to return customers and how
the return had an impact on how likely they were to return.
After a lot of digging, we learned that if a customer had a
good return experience, they were more likely to buy from
us in the future. We set off to create the most frictionless
return experience possible and then we measured the
impact of the customer to return and what they were likely
to purchase. As we made changes to the return experience,
we carefully measured the impact.”
Note that, in this answer, the candidate could have simply
followed along with the established protocol, but he sought
to hold himself and his company to higher standard,
demonstrating real leadership and delivering results.

He did say “we” a lot in his answer, which isn’t a good idea.
You want to talk about what you yourself did, not what your
team did, unless you’re leading a team.

He could have added more details – What was this

company selling? Why was the return process difficult
specifically? How did you collect the data on the process?
What did they “dig” into?

Question: What measures have you personally put in place

to ensure performance improvement targets and standards
are achieved?

Answer given by a Solutions Architect:

“In my last job, when I joined the solutions architect team,

my main goal was to ensure that our enterprise clients
integrated seamlessly with the solutions we were providing. I
became obsessed with the onboarding of these customers
and one metric in particular, which was the time the client
signed the contract to the time they first used the services.
To me this was the metric that mattered the most, but we
weren’t paying much attention to it. I knew that if we
showed the value that our service provided sooner, they
would be more likely to stay with us over the long term. We
measured and then optimized processes based on what we
found. For a good while in that role, nearly every
measurement of success I created for myself and my team
rolled up onto the larger onboarding metric. As a result of
these efforts, over the course of a year, and ruthlessly
optimizing our processes, we cut the average time of
onboarding down by 50 percent.”

She could have added more details. What company was

this? Why solutions did they sell? Why weren’t they paying
attention to that metric? Why does showing value early
keep clients long term? What processes did they optimize?

As in the previous answer, this candidate demonstrates that

she absolutely will not settle for the status quo, and so she
sets a higher standard for her and her team. Leaders don’t
need someone else to set the bar high, because they set it
high for themselves.

She also said “we” a lot, and so she should try to balance
that with saying “I.”

Think Big
The eighth Amazon Leadership Principle is “Think Big.” If
you’re preparing for an interview at Amazon, you should ask
yourself what Amazon means by “think big” and how this
principle applies to your role at the company.

Let’s look at how Amazon explains the “Think Big” principle:

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and

communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think
differently and look around corners for ways to serve
customers.

What does the “Think Big” principle mean?

The term “to think big” means to be ambitious or to set no

limits on your thinking and goals. Other expressions you might
have heard that mean the same thing are “to go large” or
“to reach for the stars.”
If you “Think Big” you will:

• See problems as challenges and opportunities

• Be positive
• Think of things you can do, not things you can’t
• Plan what is possible, not worry about what is
impossible
• Be fearless
• Be creative
• Be able to dream and visualize what you want
Thinking big means:

• Taking a radical approach and risks when necessary,

always questioning traditional assumptions in pursuit
of the best idea.
• Creating a gutsy mission that employees can be
inspired by and get behind. Providing direction for
how to get there and explaining how everything fits
into the long-term plan.
• Continually communicating the big picture and
mission to the team in a manner that gets employees
excited.
• Actively exploring new ideas from team members,
encouraging risk taking when appropriate.

Interview questions related to “Think Big”

If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, she or
he might ask one of the following questions:
• Tell me about a time you took a calculated risk in
order to achieve a professional goal. What were the
tradeoffs? What was the outcome?
• Tell me about a time you took a big risk and it failed.
What did you learn? What would you do differently?
• Tell me about a time you went way beyond the
scope of the project and delivered.
• Tell me about your proudest professional
achievement.
• Give me an example of a radical approach to a
problem you proposed. What was the problem and
why did you feel it required a completely different
way of thinking about it? Was your approach
successful?
• How do you drive adoption for your vision/ideas?
How do you know how well your idea or vision has
been adopted by other teams or partners? Give a
specific example highlighting one of your ideas.
• Tell me about time you were working on an initiative
or goal and saw an opportunity to do something
much bigger than the initial focus.
• Tell me about a time you looked at a key process that
was working well and questioned whether it was still
the right one. What assumptions were you questioning
and why? Did you end up making a change to the
process?

How to answer questions related to “Think Big”

Question: Give an example of a time you took a calculated
risk.
Answer given by a Data Architect, who specializes in
building and maintaining disaster recovery systems:

“On a yearly basis, Huawei works together with its customers

to perform the disaster recovery drills. In this drill, we switch
over all our services from one data center to another in a
controlled fashion. A few months ago, while we were
preparing for the drill, we met an issue that could have
blocked the whole activity. A colleague was performing a
regular check on hardware resources when we found that
the number of CPUs on a database machine disaster
recovery site was not matching the number of CPUs on the
production site.

He requested a change window, brought the machine

down, changed the number of CPUs to match the
production site, but then the machine was not able to
startup. After a few calls with KVM experts at HQ, we
understood that the HQ experts couldn’t find the root cause
and the solution was to rebuild the disaster recovery
machine. To our surprise, we weren’t able to reuse resources
allocated to that dead virtual machine to a new virtual
machine. Fortunately, we had another environment hosted
in VMware, and we had resources available to host a new
machine. I suggested that we host the failed disaster
recovery database in this new platform, which was
considered risky because none of the other disaster
recovery machines were running in VMware.

The customer was worried that hosting the failed machine in

the VMware environment would mean a machine on
production and the disaster recovery databases would be
hosted in a different hypervisor environment. Their
apprehension was understandable, since no
customer/vendor would host machines in such a way.
However, I explained to them that Oracle is agnostic about
which hypervisor it is running on. As long as the OS version,
OS type, and DB version are the same, Oracle would work
without a problem.

Therefore, going against the normal way of doing things, I

rebuilt the 6.5TB database in a VMware environment in 20
hours. A day later we successfully performed disaster
recovery switchover and switchback operation.”

This candidate used his technical expertise for “thinking big,”

i.e., a willingness to solve a problem in an unconventional
way. His confidence in his own expertise mitigated what
others would have perceived as a “risky” technical
maneuver.

Question: Give an example of how you set goals.

Answer given by a VP of Digital Product Development at

large financial institution:

“I tend to set very ambitious goals for my team and also

myself professionally. An example of this is that, as soon as I
joined my current company, I knew I wanted to lead an
organization. I set small goals to achieve that ultimate goal.

I needed to be the best individual contributor on my team,

and I did that by delivering the Merrill Lynch mobile
application platform for financial analysts. I was recognized
for this and was promoted within a year and a half of joining.
I then set my sights on the next milestone, which was to lead
multiple teams and manage multiple apps on multiple
platforms. This is when I hired someone really strong to
delegate some of the mobile platform work under me, so
that I could oversee the creation of the desktop platform for
financial analysts.

I led the design and implementation of the Client 360 app,

which was our internal flagship app. The work required that I
coordinate across seven different teams, each one building
components in isolation before eventually integrating them
into one single-page app.

I was recognized for my leadership quality during this effort

and was promoted again in two years. Since that time, I
have managed to deliver multiple applications, such as
Client Profile and Relationship Tree on the desktop platform,
while continuing to grow the mobile app customer base.

I am the youngest of all my peers, and they all had a VP title

before me. But because of my hard work, dedication, and
relentless pursuit of perfection, I am being considered for my
next promotion this year before all my peers.”

This is a more personal topic than the first answer, but this is
fine because the question was more personal because it
asked about a personal behavior and not a past
experience. I think you should avoid using examples that talk
about your personality or personal life rather than job-
related experiences for most of the interview but it’s fine if
you want to use one or two.

The candidate’s ambition really shines through in this answer.

Note how she “thinks big” and tackles the most ambitious
projects, but is always looking ahead to the next challenge

Bias for Action

The ninth Amazon leadership principle is “Bias for Action.” If
you’re preparing for an interview at Amazon, you should ask
yourself what Amazon means by “Bias for Action” and how
this principle applies to your past experience and to your
future role at the company.

Let’s look at how Amazon explains the “Bias for Action”

principle:

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are

reversible and do not need extensive study. We value
calculated risk taking.

What does the “Bias for Action” principle mean?

Having a bias for action means you’re not afraid to make

decisions and take action, even when (especially when) you
face uncertainty. Maybe you’ve worked with someone or a
team who didn’t have a bias for action. In the face of
uncertainty, these individuals freeze and can’t make a
decision. They’re afraid of getting it wrong and being held
accountable for making a poor decision.

This sort of “analysis paralysis” isn’t tolerated at Amazon.

They want leaders who are willing to put themselves out
there and take a risk. These leaders are no different than
anyone else in their fear of failure. What makes them stand
out is that they accept risk and make calculated decisions
that unblock them and the people they work with. Yes,
Amazon wants you to look at data and make sense of it and
use it to form your plan, but they don’t want you to get stuck
looking at the data. They want you to move past research
and analysis into action.

Here are the characteristics of someone having a “Bias for

Action”:
• When faced with a tough decision that will help you
and your team move forward, you don’t avoid that
decision. You’re not afraid to step up and make the
call.
• You encourage this same behavior in your direct
reports. You let them know you’ll stand behind them if
they take a risk that doesn’t work out.
• If you’re missing some key piece of information, you
try to get it as quickly as possible. If you can’t, you’re
not afraid to move ahead without it.
• You foster an environment of action bias by
responding promptly to colleagues looking for
information, and always deliver on your promises.
• You roll up your sleeves and remove obstacles, even
when it’s “not your job.”
• Still stuck? You ask for help. You don’t let yourself or
your team be stuck for days at a time.

Interview questions related to “Bias for Action”

If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, she or
he might ask one of the following questions:

• Tell me about a time you took a risk. What kind of risk

was it?
• Give me an example of a calculated risk that you
have taken where speed was critical. What was the
situation and how did you handle it? What steps did
you take to mitigate the risk? What was the
outcome?
• Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with
incomplete information. How did you make it and
what was the outcome?
• Describe a time you had to make an important
decision on the spot to close a sale.
• Describe a situation where you made an important
business decision without consulting your manager.
What was the situation and how did it turn out?
• Tell me about a time when you had to analyze facts
quickly, define key issues, and respond immediately
to a situation. What was the outcome?
• Tell me about a time when you have worked against
tight deadlines and didn't have the time to consider
all options before making a decision. How much time
did you have? What approach did you take?
• Give an example of when you had to make an
important decision and had to decide between
moving forward or gathering more information. What
did you do? What information is necessary for you to
have before acting?
• Describe a time when you saw some problem and
took the initiative to correct it rather than waiting for
someone else to do it.
• Tell me about a time you needed to get information
from someone who wasn’t very responsive. What did
you do?
• Tell me about a time where you felt your team was
not moving to action quickly enough. What did you
do? (Manager)
• Tell me about a time when you were able to remove
a serious roadblock/barrier preventing your team
from making progress? How were you able to remove
the barrier? What was the outcome? (Manager)

How to answer questions related to “Bias for Action”

Question: Tell me about a time you had to make a decision
quickly.

Answer given by a Senior Backup Engineer:

“We had to expand the storage capacity of a Commvault

server to accommodate new machines that were coming
online. We planned to double the capacity of the server
from 32 to 64 terabytes. For this upgrade, the server had to
be converted to MediaAgent, a procedure that was
documented and tested. We followed the documentation
closely, but in production, the Windows batch file that was
supposed to convert the server to MediaAgent accidentally
deleted some important files on the server, effectively
rendering the existing Commvault server useless. All backups
from applications/DB started failing.

While experts from Commvault HQ were engaged to find

the root cause, the customer was informed about this
problem. In an hour, I determined that the problem was not
easily fixable. I wanted to use a new server, but the
Commvault license was linked to a particular IP address.
Instead of waiting to hear back from Commvault HQ and
our purchasing department on getting another license, I
simply copied the XML license to a new machine, changed
the IP, and updated the existing license. At that point, the
team could move forward.”
How does this answer show a “Bias for Action”? With the
backup server rendered inoperable, the engineer in this
story was faced with a big problem. The more time she
wasted, the more backup data would be lost. But she didn’t
wait for others to solve her problem. She quickly diagnosed
the problem and identified a workaround that would get the
team back on its feet. That’s a “Bias for Action.”

Question: Tell me about a time you had to make a decision

quickly.

Answer given by a Solutions Architect:

“One of the largest insurance providers in North America has

been a long-standing customer. They had been using a
different vendor’s solution for UNIX bridging capability. Once
they learned that we also offer a UNIX bridging solution, they
wanted to conduct a proof of concept. As I had been
working with that customer as a trusted advisor, they
requested me to do the POC.

Before starting the POC, I had a working session with the

customer’s technical team to review the use cases currently
being implemented. Upon reviewing the use cases, I found
out that one of their key use cases is not supported out of
the box by our solution. Supporting that use case would
require an enhancement to the existing product
functionality. Given the importance of the POC, I reached
out internally for an approval to engage the engineering
team immediately and worked with the team in adding that
capability to the product. I didn’t want to wait to do this.

The engineering team provided a patch in a short time, and

I was able to successfully deliver the POC addressing all the
use cases.”
In this story, the solutions architect could have told the
customer that the product doesn’t support the use case.
Instead, he coordinated with his team a quick product
update (a “patch”) that would accommodate the use
case, leading to a successful POC. This answer shows a “Bias
for Action” and true “Customer Obsession”!

Frugality
The tenth Amazon Leadership Principle is “Frugality.” If you’re
preparing for an interview at Amazon, you should ask
yourself what Amazon means by frugality and how this
principle applies to your past roles and your future role at the
company.

Let’s look at how Amazon explains the “Frugality” principle:

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed

resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no
extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed
expense.

What does the “Frugality” principle mean?

If you’re frugal, you try to save money. You’ll want to show

you can do the job without spending more and that having
not enough time or resources is fine. Resource constraints
are not a huge problem that will stop you from succeeding;
it’s something you can deal with.

However, you can be “frugal” with more things than money.

You can also save time or other resources, including person
hours.

It’s not that Amazon is cheap. In fact, the “Frugality”

principle is not necessarily about saving money at all. The
logic behind this principle is that Amazon uses frugality as a
forcing function – meaning that the company believes that
constraints can help drive creativity and innovation. After all,
if you don’t have money to spend, you’ll have to find ways
to do things more cheaply or efficiently.

Interview questions related to “Frugality”

If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, she or
he might ask one of the following questions:

• Tell me about a time where you thought of a new

way to save money for the company.
• Describe a time when you had to manage a budget
(or manage time/money/resources/etc.). Were you
able to get more out of less?
• Here at Amazon we are frugal – how will you manage
projects with no budget and no resources?
• Tell me about a time when you had to work with
limited time or resources.

How to answer questions related to “Frugality”

Question: Tell me about a time when you had to work with
limited time or resources.

Answer given by a Category Marketing Manager:

Note This person managed a mileage program at a major

gas company.

“After I presented the scope of our new rewards program to

my supervisors, they approved the strategy. However, we
did not have the budget to afford all of the components of
it. Therefore, I would have to modify my plan. I began to
explore other ideas.

At this point, I had a partnership contract with a Brazilian

company for the prizes of our giveaways. I decided to try
and negotiate with them a sponsorship for the first year of
the program by showing that my business plan was
forecasting an increase in traffic to their marketplace, which
would result in many new customers and sales. Besides that, I
could communicate their program to millions of people in
our gas stations and in our app.

Fortunately, they ended up sponsoring the first year of the

program, and I was able to launch it in that same quarter.
This program turned out to be very good for the partnership
because 70 percent of our customers were redeeming their
points for miles (not discounts), which was the goal of the
project. Additionally, every month, we sent thousands of
new customers to Smiles’ Marketplace, as was forecast in
the business plan. My plan increased the number of
transactions on their website from 100,000 to 330,00 per
month.”

In this answer, the Marketing Manager describes how she

found a creative way to resource against an approved
strategy by leveraging an existing partnership. Note in her
answer that she accepts but is undeterred by the business
constrains of a limited budget. Her resourcefulness and
creative problem-solving skills demonstrate a “Frugality”
mindset.

Question: Tell me about a time where you thought of a new

way to save money for the company.

Answer given by a DevOps Engineer:

“My company wanted to speed up and have improved
monitoring for software deployments to our production
environment. The management team was convinced that
we should use a third-party tool, and we started to explore
options. I attended a number of demos with the team, and
we all agreed on the best third-party tool. I thought that the
tool was good, but it was costly, and even though it was a
management decision, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we
should explore the option of building the tooling in-house for
long-term cost savings.

I analyzed the level of effort it would take me and the team

to build the same core functionality of the third-party tools,
and I included maintenance cost over time. I compared
that cost to the cost of the third-party license, and added
the additional cost that we would incur integrating these
third-party tools into our systems. I presented my findings to
the management team. Based on my analysis, we changed
course, and saved significant costs, especially over the long-
term.”

In this answer, the DevOps Engineer demonstrates a

“Frugality” mindset around a decision that wasn’t even his to
make. The easier way forward for the engineer would have
been to just go along with the plan and be done with it, but
leaders know that waste hurts the team and the company. If
you have a “Frugality” mindset, the financial health of the
company is always factored into your decision making.

Earn Trust
The eleventh Amazon Leadership Principle is “Earn Trust.” If
you’re preparing for an interview at Amazon, you should ask
yourself what Amazon means by “Earn Trust” and how this
principle applies to your role at the company.
Let’s look at how Amazon explains the “Earn Trust” principle:

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others

respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing
so is awkward or embarrassing. They benchmark themselves
and their teams against the best.

So let’s take a closer look at this principle.

The first sentence of the principle is straightforward and

expected in any professional environment. The interview is a
great opportunity for you to “Earn Trust” by listening to your
interviewer attentively and answering questions candidly.

In the second sentence of the “Earn Trust” principle, things

get more interesting. At Amazon, you are expected to win
over your colleagues (i.e., earn their trust) by being “vocally
self-critical.” In other words, you’re not afraid to point out
your own faults to others. To win trust, you must show that
you understand best-in-class standards, and that you seek to
meet or exceed them.

So how do you “Earn Trust”? Leaders at Amazon embody

this principle by:

• Consistently making good decisions

• Keeping commitments
• Treating others and their ideas with respect
• Adhering to high ethical standards
• Admitting failures
• Listening, communicating, and delegating to help
employees get the right things done
Leaders “Earn Trust” when they “take the hit.” When
undesirable outcomes happen, we’re all quick to point the
finger. If your team members see that you’re willing to take
the blame for the good of the team, even if it’s not directly
your fault, then they’ll start to let go and trust you. As leader
of a team, you need to accept the responsibility for both the
good and the bad.

True collaboration is only possible in an atmosphere of trust.

And that atmosphere must be set by a leader who has
earned his team members’ trust and who trusts them in
return.

Interview questions related to “Earn Trust”

If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, she or
he might ask one of the following questions:

• Tell me about a time you had to earn trust quickly.

• Building trust can be difficult to achieve at times. Tell
me about how you’ve effectively built trusting
working relationships with others on your team.
• Describe a time when you significantly contributed to
improving morale and productivity on your team.
What were the underlying problems and their causes?
How did you prevent them from negatively impacting
the team in the future?
• Give an example of a time where you were not able
to meet a commitment to a team member. What
was the commitment and what prevented you from
meeting it? What was the outcome and what did you
learn from it?
• Describe a time when you needed the cooperation
of a peer or peers who were resistant to what you
were trying to do. What did you do? What was the
outcome?
• Tell me about a piece of direct feedback you
recently gave to a colleague. How did he or she
respond?
• How do you like to receive feedback from coworkers
or managers?
• Tell me about a time when someone (peer,
teammate, supervisor) criticized you about a piece of
work/analysis that you delivered. How did you react?
What was the outcome?
• Tell me about a time when you had to tell someone a
harsh truth.
• Tell me about a time you had to communicate a big
change in direction for which you anticipated people
would have a lot of concerns. How did you handle
questions and/or resistance? Were you able to get
people comfortable with the change?
• How do you convince someone who is resistant to
what you’re trying to do?

How to answer questions related to “Earn Trust”

Question: How did you quickly earn your client’s trust?

Answer given by a Solutions Architect:

“One of the largest mass entertainment companies in North

America purchased licenses for product X and signed a
statement of work (SOW) for Professional Services for
implementing the solution.

I was the architect and hands on technical resource for

doing the migration. I created detailed standard operating
procedures, end user training materials, and delivered end
user trainings once the solution went live in production, even
though these weren’t in the scope of the services SOW.

I was engaged in building the long-term deployment

roadmap, working very closely with customer’s stakeholders.
By demonstrating strong technical acumen and client-
facing skills, I was able to earn trust in a short period of time. I
quickly became part of the customer’s inner circle.

The solution was successfully deployed, and we went live

with one of their key services in production. The initial SOW
was for a three-month engagement, but we stayed with the
customer for about two years delivering services. We were
able to successfully expand the solution capabilities during
that period, assisting the customer in further enhancing their
security protocols.”

In this story, notice how the solutions architect credits her

“technical acumen and client-facing skills” for winning the
customer over. But earlier in the story, she described how she
had already demonstrated that she was willing to go above
and beyond the requirements of the SOW to make the
project successful. In other words, she set a higher standard
for both herself and the project. This type of behavior will
help you “Earn Trust” at Amazon.

Let’s look at another answer for the same question, this time
from an Account Executive:
“One of the large full-service banks in North America had
already purchased our product licenses to manage the
company system permissions and user identity. Due to
organizational changes, the new leadership team had
decided to shop for alternative solutions, and
compare/contrast all the functional/technical capabilities
before finalizing a single solution. My accounts team brought
me in to talk about the solution, and why it would be a good
fit for this client.

As a first step, I flew to L.A. and conducted an all-day

workshop with the key stakeholders to carefully listen to their
concerns and reasons for the vendor solution review
exercise, as well as to understand their business and the
technical requirements. We had good discussions during this
workshop. I told them that I agreed to some of the areas of
improvements in our product and made a note of them for
an internal product management team review. At the same
time, I was candid in my feedback regarding some of the
requirements and suggested alternative options to minimize
operational overhead in the long run.

By the end of the day, the client wanted me to work with

them in conducting a proof of concept (POC) in their
environment. I believe listening attentively to the customer,
speaking candidly and demonstrating sound technical and
communication skills helped me in gaining trust in a short
period of time. I was able to deliver the POC successfully
and in turn signed a professional services SOW contract of
about eight hundred thousand dollars.”

After reading this story, return to the section above and read
the “Earn Trust” principle again. I hope you can see that the
story demonstrates the principle almost perfectly. Note in the
story the emphasis on attentive listening. Note also how the
person telling the story is willing to admit that the product
has faults. It’s easy to see why this person won the
customer’s trust.

Question: Tell me about a time you coached someone and

provided feedback

Answer given by an Engineering Manager:

“One of the senior managers complained about one of the

developers on my team regarding his tone being too harsh
and frank in his emails and over the phone. My manager
brought it to my attention, and I told him I would take care
of it.

I immediately pulled this employee in for a one-on-one and

brought this to his attention. I told him it was not what he
said but how he said it that makes all the difference. There
are more politically correct ways to provide feedback to
other teams regarding their mistakes.

He agreed that he reacted out of frustration and promised

me he would be more careful going forward. It has been a
year now, and he has completely turned it around. He had
numerous accolades from other managers regarding his
integrity, and he is now one of the rising stars on my team.”

This story highlights a theme I see again and again in working

with professionals across all walks of life. As hesitant as we
sometimes are to give feedback, when we set aside our
fears and give honest, candid feedback, people are often
extremely appreciative and grow because of it. This story
demonstrates another way to “Earn Trust.”
Dive Deep
The twelfth Amazon Leadership Principle is “Dive Deep.” If
you’re preparing for an interview at Amazon, you should ask
yourself what Amazon means by dive deep and how this
principle applies to your role at the company.

Let’s look at how Amazon explains the “Dive Deep”

principle:

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details,

audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and
anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.

What does this principle mean?

I think of this principle as being on a continuum with the

“Bias for Action” principle. When you’re doing something, it
doesn’t matter what, you first need to figure out what you’re
doing (research and think) and then you need to do it (act).
I find it helpful to think about these two principles as a
continuum because job seekers tend to get stuck on one
end of it. It’s not uncommon for candidates to be great at
performing research but slow to act, or on the other end of
the continuum candidates will jump into action too quickly
without making a plan.

In order to be good at something – it doesn’t really matter

what – you need to be good at both making a plan and
acting on it. So in an interview, you want to be able to
answer the “Dive Deep” questions and also the “Bias for
Action” questions well, so that you paint a picture of yourself
as someone who can make a plan and act on it. A good
“Bias” story will have a research phase and a good “Dive
Deep” story will end in action.
A good “Dive Deep” should preferably include data borne
of research. Telling “Dive Deep” stories like this might be easy
for you if you’re a details person, as many people who have
technical jobs are. It may not be easy for you if you’re a
generalist or a big picture person. I personally tend to dislike
talking about details, because I prefer talking about ideas or
strategy. If I were going into an interview, I would need to
add details about how I followed through on ideas. If you’re
a big picture person, pay particular attention to your “Dive
Deep” stories. On the other hand, if you’re someone who
routinely digs into details, these questions are unlikely to be
difficult for you because you’re always looking at data and
you may actually have to cut down your stories so they
don’t run over three minutes.

Ex-Amazon employee and blogger Dave Anderson

summarizes the principle this way:

“Trust yet verify” is a favorite phrase at Amazon. We care

deeply that leaders keep a careful eye on what they own,
and know ways to audit their space. If something doesn’t
make sense, our leaders need to have the ability (and
interest) to dive in and figure out what’s going on.

I love when I ask questions of people, and they can go four

or five levels deep, and keep getting more excited because
the details are actually interesting to them.

Note the emphasis here on not just digging into the details,
but getting excited about those details when you talk about
them. If you are asked to speak to this principle in your
interview, it’s not enough to list details – you need to use
those details to demonstrate your enthusiasm for owning or
contributing to a project.
Interview questions related to “Dive Deep”
If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, she or
he might ask one of the following questions:

• Give me an example of when you used data to make

a decision/solve a problem.
• Tell me a time you gave insights beyond the data.
• Have you ever leveraged data to develop strategy?
• Tell me about a time you were trying to understand a
problem on your team and you had to go down
several layers to figure it out. Who did you talk with
and what info proved most valuable? How did you
use that info to help solve the problem?
• Tell me about a problem you had to solve that
required in-depth thought and analysis. How did you
know you were focusing on the right things?
• Walk me through a big problem in your organization
that you helped to solve. How did you become
aware of it? What info did you gather, what was
missing, and how did you fill the gaps? Did you do a
post mortem analysis and what did you learn?
• Can you tell me about a specific metric you’ve used
to identify a need for change in your department?
Did you create the metric or was it readily available?
How did this and other info influence the change?

How to answer questions related to “Dive Deep”

Question: Tell me about a time you performed an analysis
that that resulted in process improvements.

Answer given by a Systems Engineer:

“The process for monthly mobile phone bill generation was
slow. The bill generation process for one hundred and thirty
thousand subscribers took twelve hours. I was asked to
analyze whether there were opportunities to optimize the
process.

Unfortunately, we had minimal documentation available on

the process. I held a session with the application support
engineers to understand how we could trace this process.
After that, during the next bill cycle, we traced all database
calls for twelve hours. Then I consolidated over a thousand
trace files in chronological order and ran an Oracle profiler
called tkprof.

My analysis revealed that the process spent lots of database

time in performing single block reads and multiblock reads.
The total time spent in doing I/Os was six hours.
Approximately half of disk I/Os were taking more time than
normal. After a similar analysis in preproduction, I saw that,
even with 25% more subscribers, the bill run finished in the
same time as production. The difference was that the
preproduction environment had a newer CPU and a newer
storage system. Part of the performance improvement in
preprod was also the result of less traffic going into the
preproduction environment. I/O took a lot less time in
preprod.

After this analysis, I presented the findings in a twenty-six

page report and a brief presentation. My recommendations
were as follows:

• Move bill run data to a dedicated database

• Cache smaller tables in memory

• Move bill run data to faster disks

As a result of my recommendations, we started the

hardware modernization project, and as expected, newer
CPUs and storage helped a lot. We were able to improve
the performance of bill runs by approximately 35%. We
brought down the bill run time from 18 to 12 hours. A big
improvement, but I know I could make more progress.”

There are a lot of details in this answer from a Systems

Engineer, but note how seamlessly he weaves in technical
details to his story about a business process improvement.
Even more importantly, note how he turns research into
action. He “dives deep” but uses the information to make
concrete recommendations, showing a “Bias for Action.”
People tend to forget the “R” section of these answers – the
results. Yes, the point is that you are great at doing research,
but you still have to connect it to some action or your
research was pointless. You don’t actually have to do the
action yourself, but you can’t do the research and do
nothing with it.

Question: Walk me through a big problem in your

organization that you helped to solve. How did you become
aware of it? What info did you gather, what was missing,
and how did you fill the gaps?

Answer given by a Data Scientist:

“There are different kinds of spam; it relates to the season.

For example, there is a different kind during Christmas, the
Super Bowl, the Oscars, etc. Spammers use campaigns to
insert some kind of scam in text messages.
During the political campaigns last year, I was working on an
assignment to detect spam in politics-related text messages.
There is nothing wrong with doing campaign by text
message, although it can be annoying, but the intention
was to detect malicious messages within the body of these
messages.

I started to analyze the data by isolating messages related

to politics and then, once I had a good sample of these
messages, I used data science and machine learning
techniques to identify different patterns that could be not
related to certain campaigns. I started by defining a base of
target words which I will look for in the body of the message,
and then I clustered together the most common words
surrounding this base sample. It took me a very deep dive in
the data to find common words that are used in a masked
way, for example, one word separated by periods, numbers
substituting for some words, etc. I could only do this by
analyzing a lot of data.

At the end of the research, I tuned my code to

automatically perform the analysis and deliver reports or
alerts whenever this kind of spam was detected. To improve
my detection analysis, I continued adjusting and fine-tuning
my code as new results and/or patterns were discovered.”

This Data Scientist uses machine learning techniques to

surface patterns to filter spam that would otherwise be
difficult to catch. Note how diving deep into the data seems
to come natural to her, as she tells her story. To an
interviewer at Amazon, you need to show that you’re not
afraid to get into the details when the situation calls for it. I
find when working with clients whose jobs revolve around
data they don’t really have a problem finding stories to talk
about they just have a problem giving proper context for
their story, structuring the stories clearly, and remembering to
connect the data to some kind of result or action.

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

The thirteenth Amazon Leadership Principle is “Have
Backbone; Disagree and Commit.” If you’re preparing for an
interview at Amazon, you should ask yourself what the
company means by having backbone and how this
principle relates to the role you’re applying for.

Let’s look at how Amazon explains the “Have Backbone”

principle:

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions

when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable
or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious.
They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion.
Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

What does this principle mean?

What does the phrase “to have backbone” mean? It’s an

English idiom that means to have strength, particularly in the
face of adversity. If I “have backbone,” it means I will stand
up for my ideas. Do you fight for your ideas or do you give
up on them if someone challenges you?

What if you fight for your idea (meaning you "disagree" with
someone) and don't win - what do you do then? Do you
support the person who did win ("commit" to their idea) or
do you try to work against them because your idea didn't
win?
If you haven’t read my section on “Are Right, A Lot” you
should read that, because that principle includes how you
manage conflict, which is related to the “Have Backbone”
principle. Both principles deal with interpersonal
relationships, in particular conflicts that arise between two
people (or one person and a group of people).

Interview questions related to “Have Backbone”

If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, she or
he might ask one of the following questions:

• Describe a situation where other members of your

team didn’t agree with your ideas. What did you do?
• Tell me about a situation where you had a conflict
with someone on your team. What was it about?
What did you do? How did they react? What was the
outcome?
• Tell me about a time when you did not accept the
status quo.
• Tell me about an unpopular decision of yours.
• Tell me about a time when you had to step up and
disagree with a team member’s approach.
• If your direct manager was instructing you to do
something you disagreed with, how would you
handle it?
• Describe a situation where you thought you were
right, but your peers or supervisor did not agree with
you. How did you convince them that you were right?
How did you react? What was the outcome?
Those are the types of questions associated with this
principle, and below are some from “Are Right.” You can
see how they are really the same questions. Let’s review
some of the questions from the “Are Right” principle:

• Tell me about a time you disagreed with a colleague.

What is the process you used to work it out?
• Tell me about a time that you strongly disagreed with
your manager on something you deemed to be very
important to the business. What was it about and how
did you handle it?
• Tell me about a time where someone openly
challenged you. How did you handle this feedback?
• Give me an example of when you took an unpopular
stance in a meeting with peers and your leader and
you were the outlier. What was it, why did you feel
strongly about it, and what did you do?
• When do you decide to go along with the group
decision even if you disagree? Give me an example
of a time you chose to acquiesce to the group even
when you disagreed. Would you make the same
decision now?
We see that the “Are Right” and “Have Backbone”
principles are related. Show your interviewer that your
approach to your work results in you being right a lot, and
that you have the courage to fight for your ideas.

How to answer the questions related to “Have Backbone”

Having to fight for your idea may make you uncomfortable.
It makes me uncomfortable because I don’t like
competitiveness or aggression (especially directed at me!).
If this type of culture intimidates you, give extra attention to
your preparation for interview questions related to conflict. If
you’re unable to answer the questions directly, you may
come across as someone who lacks the backbone to work
in a competitive environment. And Amazon really does
have a culture of “sharp elbows” so if you want the job,
you’ll need to hide your discomfort with conflict or at least
show it won’t stand in the way of your leadership. On the
other hand, if you’re someone who thrives in competitive
environments, be prepared to demonstrate that you can
manage conflict calmly and rationally, that you can
convince others with data, not by yelling or being
unnecessarily aggressive.

If you’re in an Amazon interview and you’re asked how

you’ve dealt with workplace conflict in the past, consider
the following approach:

1. First, summarize for the interviewer an idea that you

had. Tell a story about how you were convinced that
your idea was the right way forward.
2. Next, discuss the point of contention. After you
explain your idea, describe how and why someone
didn’t agree with your idea. Then, discuss what tactic
you used to win the other person over. A good way to
impress your interviewer is to describe how you used
data in making your argument.
3. Finally, if you were unsuccessful in persuading others,
explain that you “committed” regardless. It’s okay if
you lost the argument, but demonstrate that you
were mature enough to support the decision that the
company chose. On the other hand, if you were
successful in winning support for your idea, skip this
step.
In these “Backbone” stories, focus on the disagreement
between you and another person (or persons). Your goal
should be to demonstrate how you managed the conflict
itself, so don’t fast forward over it. What did you say? What
did the other person say? Did you have a meeting? Did you
look at data together? I’ve found that my clients sometimes
want to say very little about the actual disagreement and
are eager to rush to the solution, which is a mistake. Dwell
more on the details of the conflict. I know it may be boring
to relate the actual conversations you had, and normally I
think that’s too much detail for these stories, but talking
about the details is the only way to show how you handle
the interpersonal aspect of conflict.

And you can add some drama. I won’t usually advise you to
make your stories “dramatic” because this is an interview,
not entertainment, but these “Backbone” stories can be
inherently dramatic because of the conflict factor, and
that’s okay.

Question: Describe a situation where others you were

working with on a project disagreed with your ideas. What
did you do?

Answer given by an Engineering Manager:

“When I was leading the engineering team at Bank of

America in India, I proposed to my U.S. partner that we build
architecture capabilities in India. I thought that this would
save us money. He was not convinced because he felt that
the architecture team needed to collocate with users for a
better understanding of user needs, and so needed to be in
the U.S.

I still believed that my idea would work, so I proposed that,

instead of hiring an architect, we test my idea and assign a
senior developer in India to work with the U.S. architecture
team. My U.S. partner was amenable to this approach as a
“pilot project.”

I onboarded a senior developer, and he started working

with the architecture team remotely. He was working on a
migration project from Oracle to SAP. This developer, now
functioning as a remote member of the architecture team,
was able to offer significant contributions to the project from
India. He created a proof of concept for moving data
across systems, which the team ultimately used as a
framework for other work. He also helped the onshore team
prepare architecture diagrams.

Once the offshore architect started delivering from India, my

U.S. partner’s perspective on the matter began to shift. He
asked me to ramp up the architecture team with more
remote team members. After building this team, overall
delivery improved as offshore had become an extended
capability to complement the existing onshore team.”

This story shows that the engineering manager was willing to

take different approaches to get her idea across, which is
great. However, the story would be stronger if it included
more details about how she dealt with the conflict with her
U.S. partner. When you are telling a story about how you
“Have Backbone,” don’t shy away from talking about the
confrontation itself, and how you behaved in that situation.
Don’t just rush to the outcome.

Question: Was there a time when you were right but your
senior colleagues didn’t agree with you?

Answer given by a UX Designer:

“The project was helping the marketing team create
campaigns. I had designed a low-fidelity wireframe option
and was reviewing it with product management and
engineering. Our user was supposed to click on the “Create
New Campaign” button, which would then take them to
“Create Mode.” After applying a set of filters, the user would
then click “Save,” and the campaign page would then go
into the “Read Only” mode. At that point, the filters are not
accessible to the user. To access the filters again, the user
had to click the “Edit Campaign” button. Product
management and engineering did not like this flow because
they thought that the user should always be in “Edit” mode.

I tried to convince them that my flow was a common design

pattern that users would find familiar, demonstrating for
example how users added contacts on their phones. They
showed me an old desktop enterprise product and said that
it was better. Since I was struggling to convince them, I
created a flow that was in line with their suggestion and
requested that they participate in a usability test of that
flow. To me, this usability test was not strictly necessary
because I knew from experience that users would find my
proposed solution more intuitive and easier to use. I went
ahead regardless to convince my colleagues.

I had a group of users try “Option A” (which was my flow)

and another group of users try “Option B” (which was their
flow). I performed the usability tests with my colleagues so
that they could see for themselves how users interacted with
each flow. The test results showed what users preferred and
how they interact with interfaces of this type. We went with
Option A.”
This story is interesting because the UX designer sticks to his
principles in the face of adversity. Both product and
engineering are aligned against him, and it would have
been easier for him to just agree with them. But as a UX
designer, he must put users first. That’s his role on the team.
So he patiently set up the test to guide his colleagues
toward a better way.

Deliver Results
The fourteenth Amazon Leadership Principle is “Deliver
Results.” If you’re preparing for an interview at Amazon, you
should ask yourself what the company means by delivering
results and how this principle relates to the role you’re
applying for.

Let’s look at how Amazon explains the “Deliver Results”

principle:

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver
them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite
setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

What does the “Deliver Results” principle mean?

This is the fourteenth and last Amazon leadership principle,

and in many ways, it’s the most important.

Delivering results is the one thing you absolutely must do if

you work at Amazon. The other principles are important, but
they’re merely building blocks to this final one. In the words
of the principle itself, if you “rise to the occasion” – meaning
succeed in what you were doing – you’ve shown yourself to
be a leader.
You may be asking yourself, “What is the point of the other
principles if you don’t actually have to follow them?” I can
understand your confusion because you’ve been studying
the other thirteen principles, and now I’m telling you that
they’re not crucial. It’s not that the other principles aren’t
important, because they definitely are. It’s just that you
need to think of them as the building blocks, and look at
“Deliver Results” as the final product. The first thirteen are
intended to be the steps you need to take to get results.

How to answer questions related to “Deliver Results”

So how do you actually show in your answers that you’ve
delivered results? You need to tell stories about successes.

You can use a phrase like this to show your investment in

delivering results:

“I was able to have a lot of responsibility and decision-

making ability for X project, and by doing Y tasks, I delivered
results in Z number of launches.”

In this phrase, you talk about the tasks you did in order to
create a particular result. This will fit easily into your PAR
format answer – the situation or problem is the project you
were working on and the action step is the tasks you did in
order to create successful results.

Interview questions related to “Deliver Results”

If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, she or
he might ask one of the following questions:

• Describe a situation where you had to face a

particularly challenging situation while working on a
project and what you did to overcome it. (Note: The
challenge could be with respect to timeline, scope,
people, or a combination thereof.)
• How you check your progress against your goals?
• Do you set and communicate smart team goals,
expectations, and priorities; help employees stay
focused/help other remove barriers/roadblocks
towards meeting team goals?
• Tell me about a time when you were able to
persevere through setbacks and overcome obstacles
to deliver outstanding results.
• Tell me about a time where you not only met the goal
but considerably exceeded expectations. How were
you able to do it?
• What’s the most complex problem you’ve ever
worked on?
• Have you ever worked on something really hard and
then failed?

Sample answers for “Deliver Results”

Question: Tell me about a time you not only met your goals,
but exceeded expectations.

Answer given by a Senior Technical Account Manager:

“There was one time when I was working as a consultant for

USAF. On one of the daily standup calls, the client (USAF
Project manager) mentioned that most of his other
applications do smart card authentication. He wanted to
add that feature to the Oracle Application I was working on.

So, even though this wasn’t a formal request from him I ran
with it. I started a conversation with Oracle on
understanding the products we could leverage to get job
done. I set up meetings with their product teams, got to
know the product, discussed our requirements, and decided
that we could come up with a solution. I implemented that
solution in our development environment. I had the proof of
concept done before the next sprint started in four weeks.

I just about knocked the project manager’s socks off when I

showed him that POC! The feature wasn’t technically part of
the project plan, and he had no idea I would try to add it.
He was really pleased.”

I like this story because the account manager says a lot

about himself in a succinct and relatable way. He answers
the question exactly and shows he goes above and beyond
when he “Drives Results.” It comes natural to him, and he
takes pride in it. (And yes, he got the job!)

Question: Describe a situation where you had to face a

particularly challenging situation while working on a project
and what you did to overcome it.

Answer given by an Agile Coach:

“Our company recently migrated from SDLC to Agile. It was

a difficult transition due to the mindset of my peers. They
were used to delivering projects in a waterfall methodology
for such a long time it was difficult for them to completely
accept Agile principles.

I had already delivered a large project with Agile using Jira

as the tool while working very closely with our business
partners and analysts. I could see my manager was
struggling with bringing everyone completely on board. So I
took the initiative of learning Rally and setting up all my
peers with workspace in Rally. I also created a guide with
instructions on using various functionality in Rally for them to
set up their teams and how to get started with Agile
ceremonies. My manager was appreciative of my efforts.

Not every organization/team was going to go Agile at the

same time, so we had a large integration project this year
where the team was still waterfall whereas ours was Agile.
This project was an ideal candidate to form a vertical stack
Agile team and collaborate throughout the year to deliver. I
was able to present a case to senior management of their
organization to form a cross-organizational Agile team.
Today we have a cross functional and cross org Agile team
that has a set cadence.”

This story is about one of the most challenging parts of any

business – culture change. When choosing your own stories,
try to think of challenging situations that the interviewer may
have experience him or herself. To “Drive Results,” the Agile
Coach took control of the situation by learning new tools
and methodologies, and then introduced those concepts to
his immediate team. He then used what he learned to drive
change in other parts of the organization.
Follow-Up Questions
The Amazon interview style is to ask lots of follow up
questions after the interviewee gives their initial answers.

Don’t get nervous. Being asked follow-up questions doesn’t mean

your answer was bad. Interviewers are told to ask everyone follow
up questions. Consider these follow up questions another part of
the interview and prepare for them.

Follow-Up Question Format

If your first pass at the answers has to follow the PAR format,
do the follow up question answers have to as well? No. You
can think of the challenge questions more like a
conversation you’re having with the interviewer than a
traditional question and answer, so you don’t need to give
the full formal answer in PAR structure.

Use Real Stories

It shouldn’t be hard to answer the follow up questions if the
story you’re using was about a real scenario. If, however,
your story isn’t real, you will probably have a hard time with
the follow up questions. Some people also have problems if
their story was real but they don’t remember the details well
enough to talk in depth about what happened.

Possible Follow-Up Questions

Here are some questions you might be asked as follow-up
questions:

Questions about the beginning of your story

(Situation/Task/Problem)
• Why is this important?
• What was the goal?
• What was the initial scope of the project?
• What were the challenges?

• What were the risks and potential consequences if

nothing happened?
• Why did you choose this story to illustrate this
accomplishment?

• What other stories can you think of that demonstrate

this?

• Could you come up with an example that is more

recent?

Questions about the middle of your story (Action)

• Were you the key driver or project owner?
• You mentioned that “we” did…. What exactly was
your contribution versus the team?
• What was your biggest contribution?
• What unique value did you bring?

• What were the most significant obstacles you faced?

How did you overcome them?

• How did you set priorities?

• How did you deal with X problem?
• How did you get manager buy-in?
• What decisions did you challenge? Why?
• How did you influence the right outcome?
• Exactly how did you approach…?
• Tell me more about…
Questions about the end of your story (Results)
• How did you measure success for this project?
• What results did you achieve specifically? (cost
savings, revenue generation, volume, size, scale,
percentage change, year over year improvements,
time to market, implementation time, time savings,
impact on the customer, the team…)
• What was the financial impact?
Avoiding Common Mistakes

Add Data to Your Answers

Amazon loves data.

Data is the ultimate way to answer an Amazon interview

question.

You should add data to your answer proactively, so your

interviewer doesn’t have to ask you for it. If you don’t add
data yourself, they’ll probably ask you for it.

One way they ask for data is to ask you why you did what
you did. It’s common for them to keep asking you “why”
until they’ve asked it five or more times, each time trying to
get at the next layer of your answer, testing your ability to
dive deep and get granular.

Your answers should have a balance of enough data but

not too much. They want you to show enough so that you
clearly can use data but if you give too many details they
won’t have any time for follow up questions (and they’ll get
bored).

Example of an answer with data

In this scenario the candidate is the CEO of a mid-sized
landscaping company. You may not be able to relate to this
business, but it’s a simple answer that will show you the right
way to use data.

Interviewer: You mentioned you didn’t make revenue in

2016. Can you walk me through why?

Mediocre answer:
“In 2016 there wasn’t as much rainfall as there had been in
previous years, so it led to a lot of our customers’ grass
yellowing and subsequently not being cared for by our
team. This ultimately hurt revenues.”

Better answer:

“In the area of Texas where we do 65% of our business, the

average rainfall in the summer is 6 inches. In 2016 there was
a shortage of rain and the total was down to 2 inches.

Unfortunately, the grass that is most common in that area of

Texas is St. Augustine, which requires at least 4 inches of rain
to sustain a natural growth pattern. When the grass grows
naturally, we are able to remain on a typical cadence of
lawn service for our customers, which is bi-weekly. When the
grass doesn’t grow enough (like when it doesn’t rain as
much), customers generally cancel some of their work with
us because the grass simply doesn’t need to be cut.

In order to prevent the same loss of revenue in 2017 that we

had in 2016, we knew we needed to do as much as we
could to prevent the same thing from happening again. We
can’t control the weather, but we hired a weather analytics
firm to give us estimates of rainfall 60 days prior to summer.
When we saw that there might again be less rain, we knew
we could offer our customers an opportunity to plant a
different type of grass that could survive a summer with less
than average rainfall.”

Analysis of “mediocre” versus “better” answers

The “mediocre answer” above is an example of answering
the question and getting to the root of the issue.
Unfortunately, this response is very surface level and does
not go into enough detail for what interviewers are looking
for.

In the “better answer” the candidate used data to work

though the scenario. They outlined the granular details and
painted a complete picture of the why behind the solution.
Answer the why before you get asked about it.

You may be in a different business than this interviewee, but I

think this answer gives you an idea of what good use of
data can be.

Your answer can be longer than this – this is a fairly short

answer. You can actually give more details about what you
did and what the results were. Your answer can be up to 2
or 2.5 minutes long.

The example answers I give elsewhere in the book are also

good examples of using data. In fact, it’s rare in a
behavioral question to not use data. Sometimes it’s okay,
but you’ll find that in most of your stories you are going to be
talking about data. Some will be more data heavy than
others of course, but most of them will have some kind of
data.

I Versus We
Make sure your answers use the word “I” instead of using
“we.” Often people are trained to use “we” when talking
about their work. They say “we finished the project” instead
of “I finished the project.”

It is definitely more polite to use “we” when talking about

your work because “we” sounds like you’re paying attention
to your team and not trying to take all the credit for yourself.
However, being polite is not the number one thing you need
to do in an interview. You do want to be polite, but you
need to say what you yourself did, even if you feel this isn’t
very polite.

Your team isn’t at the interview, you are. If you don’t talk
about your own tasks, you might get asked “But what was
your role exactly in that?”

Stalling
Even if you practice enough before your interview you may
still get a question you don’t know how to answer. What
should you do if this happens?

Don’t panic
Stay calm. Not knowing how to answer a question is actually
a normal thing and it can happen to us all. If you stay calm,
you’ll be able to deal with it.

Emergency techniques for stalling in the interview

• Take your time.
You can acknowledge that the question was asked
and that you’re thinking about it. You can say, “That’s
a great question. Let me think about that.”
Then you can be silent for a few seconds before you
start talking.
• Repeat the question.
Sometimes all you need to think of an intelligent
answer is a few extra seconds.
Try repeating the question.
If they ask, “Why do you want to work at Amazon?”
You can say, “Ah, you’d like to know why I want to
work here. Okay.”
Or you can try this, “Where do you see yourself in five
years?”
“In five years, I’d like to be…”
This can buy you a few extra seconds to think of a
solid response.
Ask them to repeat or rephrase the question
You can ask them to repeat or rephrase the question.
Don’t use this more than once because it will look like
you’re not paying attention.
• Talk about the question.
When you’ve tried repeating the question, try
focusing on it instead. Say things like "that's a really
good question" or "I was wondering when this
question would come up" or "I was hoping you would
address that topic."
Again, this gives you a moment to think.
I know using “fillers” isn’t generally a good thing.
Many people say “um” or “uh” or “you know” or other
nonsense words too much. It’s true, you don’t really
want to use fillers, and these stalling techniques are a
type of filler. But it’s better to stall than to say nothing.
• Drink some water.
Do you have a bottle of water sitting next to you?
Take a drink before you answer.
• Be honest.
If you have no answer, you can say that, but you
need to do it well.
You can't just say "I don't have an answer for that, so
let's go to the next question."
You can admit that you can’t think of an answer at
the moment and ask to come back to the question
later in the interview after you’ve had a chance to
think. You can say, “I’m sorry, I can’t think of an
answer to that, can you ask me again at the end?”
This isn’t ideal, of course, because you’re supposed to
be answering their questions, but it’s much better
than silence. It shows you can handle an awkward
situation.
You can only use this once, so don't use it on
something where you have some idea of an answer,
and they may actually remember to ask you the
question again at the end, so keep working on an
answer as you answer the other questions.
You also can’t use this tactic on a common, easy
question. If they ask, “Why did you leave your last
job?” and you can’t think of an answer, you have
absolutely no chance of getting the job.
Think of these as emergency techniques. They can’t
substitute for thorough interview practice, but they can help
you if things don't go as you would expect.
After the interview
If your interview’s over, you’re probably thinking, “Now that
my interview’s over, do I need to do anything else?” Yes,
actually, you do need to do one more thing. What one thing
is that?

Send a Thank You Note

After you finish your interview, it’s important to thank the
interviewer. I don’t mean while you’re still talking to them,
although you should do this too, I mean afterward.

A quick thank you within 24 hours is expected by most

interviewers.

You won’t get the job only because you sent a thank you,
but you’ll be noticed if you don’t send one.

What format should the thank you note be in?

Email is the best way to send a thank you.

In some companies and industries written thank you notes

are common, but in tech companies like Amazon sending a
written note doesn’t fit the culture. Use email.

When should you send the thank you?

Within 24 hours. If you can send it the same day, do that.

The reason you’re sending the note is because you want to

give the interviewer one more reason to think positively of
you. If you send it after they’ve already made up their mind
about whom to hire, what’s the point? You want to send it
quickly, so you have a chance to influence them.
What to say in the thank you note
A note that says simply “thank you for meeting with me” is
nice, but what does it show? That you have manners?
Manners are good, but they probably already know you
have manners (I hope you showed them you have manners
during your interview.)

There are several things you can say in your note:

• You should say “thank you for meeting with me.”

• You can promote yourself more by reminding them of
your skills or experience.
• You can refer to something you said in your interview
if you want to underline it.
• If there’s something you forgot to say, say it.
• Tell them one reason you’re excited to have the job.

Thank you email template

You can use this template for the basic idea and customize
it or personalize it with your own ideas.

Hi [Interviewer Name],

Thank you for meeting with me today. I enjoyed learning

more about the job, and I’m excited about the opportunity
to join Amazon and [do whatever you would be doing].

I look forward to hearing from you about the next steps in

the hiring process. Don’t hesitate to contact me if I can
provide additional information.

Best regards,

[Your Name]
Thank you email example #1
Dear X,

I would like to take the time to thank you and the hiring
team for your willingness to speak to me on Friday about the
X position. I’m excited by the prospect of working for X and
adding my expertise to your team.

My skills seem to be an ideal fit for the X role, and to

reiterate, I feel that I could be a great asset as I am able to
think and act globally in the area of X.

I enjoyed our interview and look forward to speaking with

you again about the role.

Sincerely,

Example #2
This is the same email but has one additional paragraph. I
think shorter is always better in business writing, but some
people don’t agree and write more than I would myself. This
version isn’t wrong but isn’t my style. If it feels right to you to
add more info like this in the email then you go ahead.

Dear X,

I would like to take the time to thank you and the hiring
team for your willingness to speak to me on Friday about the
X position. I’m excited by the prospect of working for X and
adding my expertise to your team.

My skills seem to be an ideal fit for the X role, and to

reiterate, I feel that I could be a great asset as I am able to
think and act globally in the area of X.
In addition to my X skills acquired during my time at X, I also
bring several years of X skills to the position. Engineering is
more than just design. It also needs to meet the needs of the
customer.

I enjoyed our interview and look forward to speaking with

you again about the role.

Sincerely,

Send a LinkedIn Connection Request

After you send your thank you email, you can also send a
LinkedIn connection request. This is one more chance to
communicate with your interviewer and make a good
impression.

LinkedIn connection request template

“It was a pleasure meeting you and learning more about
Amazon and the [name of position]. I’m very interested in
joining your team. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you
have any questions. In the meantime, I’d like to add you to
my LinkedIn network.”

You don’t need to say any more than that with your request.
And don’t send them more messages over LinkedIn after the
initial request unless they write to you first.

What if I don’t have their email address?

If you don’t know their email address you can send the
thank you in the body of the LinkedIn request instead of in
an email.
About the Author
Jennifer Scupi is an interview coach and the founder of
interviewgenie.com.

You won't find many interview coaches who combine

corporate management experience, a graduate degree in
corporate communication, and English teaching
experience. Jennifer has used this combination of skills to
help many people succeed at interviewing. To help
candidates succeed, the recruiting team at Amazon refers
clients to her.

If you need to interview to get a job at Amazon, Jennifer

can help you. If you’ve finished the book and you want
more help preparing for your interview, write to her at
[email protected].

Thank you for reading this book. If you found it useful, please
consider leaving an honest review on Amazon.