Real Amazon Interview Experience- Program Manager

hi I'm Gigi and EX Amazon bar raiser here at day one careers this video is one of a series that we're putting together so you can hear from current amazonians about their journey to Amazon and their interview experience obviously this channel is packed with our advice and best practices but as I've explained many times the Amazon interview process isn't completely homogeneous people have varied experiences and approaches so we've been talking to current amazonians to get their stories now just one thing I will say is that some of the strategies deployed by the people that I interviewed wouldn't necessarily be strategies that we'd advise but it worked for them so I'm sharing them with you and you can draw your own conclusions I hope you enjoy meeting them as much as I did so hey Maddie how are you doing I'm very well Gigi good afternoon how are you I'm very well thank you I've got to start with honestly thank you so much for taking the time out of your Saturday it's Saturday you kind of late evening where are you exactly actually I don't know I'm currently in India so it is 7 20 p.m okay all right well thank you for giving me your Saturday night I mean cool living it up spending Saturday night thank you thank you so much no I I appreciate being here with you so I thank you thank you for the opportunity amazing so we're just gonna have a chat basically because I know that you're a relatively recent Joiner to Amazon and I'll we'll talk through all of that in a minute and of course you've also been following kind of the Amazon Interview with which is then obviously recently morphed into day one careers for a while so we got a little bit of a history together which is super cool and it's fantastic to see you on the other side through your journey we're gonna we're gonna chat through your journey so tell me where were you before what brought you to Amazon uh so I was I worked in multiple sectors I worked in the healthcare sector that I worked in the uh you know Finance sector and I had essentially taken a career break part of it which was uh you know voluntary uh because I wanted to be with my family I hadn't seen them in five and a half years since I was in the US uh and part of it was then driven by uh you know the pandemic that all of us faced in 2020 so my background essentially is I'm an engineer by education I did a double Masters in the US and I primarily worked as a business process consultant and also as a product manager and that's when I decided that uh you know I wanted to start interviewing for uh big Tech firms to be able to do uh more quality work so I was focused on quality and the interesting thing is that uh when I had the Amazon offer I had offers from Netflix and also from Wayfair but uh the leadership principles at Amazon is actually What drew me to them uh sounds like a cliche now that I'm an Amazonian or however that is the truth of the matter and uh you know we'll talk more about my story but I think that's a validate uh the fact that what I'm saying is actually true and not because I'm an Amazonian yes for sure and just for the sake of everyone that's watching tell us what is your role at Amazon what team do you work in what's your job function uh so I am part of The Last Mile and quality analytics team which is also referred to as the lmeq team uh and I'm currently in the role of a program manager there uh where my goal is to be able to build programs and solve the pain points for uh you know the delivery partners that we have uh the drivers and also basically the dsps who are individuals who make sure uh that all of our products get into the van and then get delivered to us uh so you know given the uh magnanimity of for the packages that Amazon delivers on an everyday basis across the globe it is very important that we make sure that we are serving our delivery assistance our delivery Partners uh with the right impact or you know with the right uh with the right resources so that they are comfortable on their routes right uh so that is the program that I am working on uh and I am working primarily with um six intake feedback mechanisms to be able to evaluate the kind of data that comes there and then build solutions for them okay awesome sounds incredible and actually I was interviewing someone from Ops last week I think and I don't know whether I'll release that one by the time I release this one but he was talking to me about something like I might remember this wrong like a million packages going through a single one of a single FC in a day absolutely absolutely so he's he's absolutely correct when he says that uh and uh you know just um when we have customers in fact you know if even if you're not on the lmaq team at Amazon right you may not know the uh number of packages that are going through because if someone's working on Alexa or prime uh those segments are very different right uh but it is when you are say at the middle mile or The Last Mile uh the teams that we work on we have that first-hand experience of being able to understand uh the kind of packages that actually go out every day and when you're only an Amazon Customer it's you go at the click of a button the product order gets placed and because you're a Prime member you're going to get it in two days yeah and it all seems so easy as a customer you're spoiled because you just press the button you expect that it'll be here two days and if it's like day two one hour you're like oh where's my package and then it's so much that it goes on behind the scenes to make that possible it's mad absolutely so then let's have a chat about you decided that you wanted to go and work at Big Tech and you mentioned that you had offers for Wayfair and Netflix and obviously Amazon I'm sure you applied to a few others so why don't you if you wouldn't mind I've been asking everybody to just tell me about their preparation process everyone has very different preparation processes some I have found a little surprising some I think have been a bit more standard so share with me like how did you go about you'd have to tell me bit you know my new shy detail but how did you go about preparing kind of where did you go for resources what did you prioritize yeah sure absolutely so let me start with this that um you know I of course I was leveraging LinkedIn right uh and I happen to have networked with someone who works for Amazon in Bangalore in India or I didn't know this gentleman and he had worked for four and a half years then taken a six months break and then come back so he was a boomerang candidate as you know we'd call it and uh so he came back and uh when I got my interview in white I just reached out to him uh just to get some input and I I categorically remember him saying this that mandakini if you treat the Amazon behavioral interview just as a behavioral interview for any other organization you will not clear it um and that stuck with me because I wasn't sure what he was referring to I I didn't even know what he meant right uh so I asked him to just share a few more details with me and he did and uh that one sentence uh essentially became the pillar uh because of which I prepared the way I did and then of course I went online and I identified what sources were there and uh I don't remember how I stumbled upon your YouTube page I I wish I remembered that I'd be happy to share it but I really don't uh but I did yeah and that was my next stop uh I made sure to watch the entire playlist you have for Amazon interviews it's a good thing you're not watching it now because it's about three times as long as it was like a year because I should go back and see you know what what more I should be learning uh and and I did that and I began to make notes as to uh not just what the leadership principle said you know so it wasn't just about customer Obsession or it wasn't just about our right a lot but it was about okay what is what is the interviewer going to want to hear from me and then what I did is I went back to my resume and I picked up each bullet point on my resume and started building scenarios out of that in the star method because what was going to happen is that I was sure that I wanted to take into account how many scenarios I needed to have so that I wouldn't repeat and I remember a video of yours which categorically said if you're going to repeat a scenario take permission because during the debrief you don't want to be in a situation where the interviewers you know may wonder that I as an interviewee perhaps didn't have the depth of knowledge and therefore I implemented a scenario right uh so I said okay if I move to the loop and I have two phone screens which means a total of seven individuals uh even if I have to talk them through three scenarios each uh which is that with a buffer I need to have 25 scenarios prepared um and therefore I picked up one bullet point each from my resume because you know if I'm talking that I improve the customer satisfaction score by 70 it just wasn't improving the customer satisfaction score uh there would have been you know from beginning to end interactions with various teams situations where I would have had to take ownership situations where I would have had to uh you know where I would have had disagreements with people right so out of one impact one one piece of the impact that I made on my resume which was literally one sentence or one bullet on my resume uh I was able to extract if not more about a minimum of about two scenarios and I I went in the reverse order I I don't know why I did this uh but I just did and it and it worked it works even today so instead of saying that I'm going to pick up having backbone disagree and commit and write three scenarios about that I just wrote every scenario possible so I ha at the end of it before I got into my loop I had 32. whoa that's a lot so I did not I was categoric about one thing that I did not at all repeat any situation uh I was almost to the point where I had to but then I said no you know let me see what else exists out there right and uh so I wrote 32 and then I mapped them right I I didn't do the other way around but I I did this I did do this uh which worked for me because there were you know there are like four or five leadership principles which which will work in every scenario whether it's customer Obsession ownership bias for Action insist on the higher standards and uh and so they were like common across the board right uh so that is that is how I prepared and uh not in the interest of wanting to scare anyone uh but I say this that uh the Amazon behavioral interview uh you know preparation needs a lot of I I think let me take that back it needs focused preparation yeah it could be four hours it could be six hours for someone uh you know it would just be two hours for someone right but it needs that focused input uh we cannot go into the interview expecting that the interviewer is going to ask us a question and we'll say okay the situation was this and this is what I did and you know in in a minute I'm done the expectation is for us to answer in the star method so we've got to be prepared accordingly right and uh that that's what I did so the interview prep material was your YouTube channel uh and uh don't name check anyone else and and there was one more uh but you know I I primarily just picked up questions from there about like you know very basic tell me about yourself so on and so forth uh but uh not really the meat and potatoes of uh you know what they interviewed me did I really really like your tip about starting from your resume because I think sometimes people your resume is a marketing document to get you through the front door and get you to interview this is true but I think sometimes at that point people just kind of abandon it whereas what I think you've done which I think is really smart is you've used it as your memory structure you know those achievements got you through the front door into interview so why wouldn't you pick out those achievements and turn them into the stories that you tell at interview that's a really smart tip I like that obviously when there's a follow-up right because the and I remember uh this was my bar raise around uh where I was asked one question only ah so in a one-hour interview it was just that one question and we continued to literally the barisa was peeling the onion and asking me and we were digging and digging deep right uh because I had picked up the stories from my resume I could keep going because that was work that I had done so that's where I found Merit in using this methodology yeah uh also it was driven by the fact that if I would have just started building my stories by myself uh I may not have got to 32. I think there's a massive number I don't think I've ever met anyone who had that any movies needed 25 if I didn't want to repeat any yeah you know given that there will be five interviewers at the Loop and a minimum of two phone screens so you know just at the bare minimum I would have needed 21 but like keeping a buffer of 25 so those many I would have needed any which way and how did you remember we're going off script now I warned you I would end up going off scriptures um how did you remember the details of 32 because this is also a question I get regularly about can I use notes how am I going to remember my data points so 32 stories how in the lord's name did you remember all of the details you needed for 32 stories sure so I'll I'll start with that I had my phone screen on February 16th of which I was informed about a week prior so what I did is I prepared five scenarios for that first phone screen right because I wouldn't have needed more than five so one I prepared where it was about a failure one I prepared for having backbone disagree and commit because I knew that there would be a question about that and three were generic covering the rest of our leadership principles and then what I did is I just made like a sheet of paper where I wrote in my own handwriting the five scenarios and what the data points for the results were because essentially the data points are needed in the result in our situation task in action we can be theoretical but our result we must end with numbers to Showcase that the situation we started with you know we ended with this result right so once that was done right I then for that one week I leveraged a psychological concept of repetition that I would continue to read those five scenarios every day at an interval of every few hours got it very methodological and then on the day of the interview I was very clear as to what the results were five were so I I just want to add one thing here Gigi if you allow me is that a lot of people when they start the Amazon Interview prep process uh because of lack of information out there uh everyone goes in thinking that it's going to be very casual without realizing that this is what the interview will entail it is not an interview like you know when I interviewed I interviewed at 11 other organizations while I was interviewing at Amazon wow but at that and the difference was that over there when I was asked a question which was behavioral it was very it was by the way and there's nothing wrong with that that's just how other organizations Focus or work our entire focus is this this is it for us you know and know what's it asking me to code right so when this is it for me then this is it I I've got to prepare like that yeah and and so then uh at the end of the phone screen I knew which scenarios I had used so now I was not going to prepare those for the loop right and and I'll be honest with you uh I was almost convinced I was not going to make it make it through because my phone screen lasted all of 22 minutes uh and and for some reason like you know I felt that okay could be the interviewer was looking for someone who had more supply chain knowledge or you know experience so I was convinced that I'm not making it through and I'm I was done but 48 hours later I get the email about going to the loop and there was no other phone screen so now there were five people for the loop so preparing three scenarios each then it was 15 scenarios and my Loops were scheduled on March 10th and 11th so between my phone and my loop I had about three weeks that's that's quite a lot of time isn't it yes yeah and then I was back to reading reading reading reading reading um and in my head being very aware that okay there are few of the leadership principles which stand out and cannot be clubbed with something else right if I am talking about having backbone disagree and commit it cannot be I cannot be giving that scenario for a question where I know that the obvious leadership principle is ownership there's no point in mixing it because you know some of like some of our scenario pieces are very specific to certain leadership principles so that was the mental model I built and I would continue reading the scenarios almost to the point that I could speak them in my sleep and that was a choice I made I'm not uh you know when this releases I don't want people to think that oh my God this is how tough it is uh my point is that I made this choice because as I continue to study the leadership principles I realized that they fell in line with the value system that I follow in my own life um so I was very clear that I need to crack the interview whether I take up the offer or not I I couldn't determine that as to where I was but I was clear that I need to crack this because Amazon's leadership principles and my value systems fall in line yeah and I think again the slightly off topic but I think that's the crazy thing about the Amazon leadership principles is once you're in them and you're living them every day you start to realize that they're not really work constrained principles their life principles so I mean crazy things like and I'm sure you do this as well you know things like taking ownership well that's about taking responsibility and accountability I often find myself saying to my children you need to take some ownership of this situation um you know if I look at of course when I interviewed we had 14 leadership principles today we have 16 right uh but even in those 14 right when we look at our right a lot which uh focuses on the fact that okay as Leaders our role is that we have to we write more often than not because our decisions impact what people are doing but we are also human so we can fail and uh I I help a lot of people just understand the leadership principles now and I tell them that it is okay to own your failure because no one is superhuman and I think that's the same thing goes for life because we will have failures in life and we have to learn from them to make sure that we don't repeat that pattern yeah absolutely so uh if someone is clear that they want to understand what is happening at Amazon and what Amazon does with their leadership principles uh I urge those people to map those leadership principles with their life today and uh I can guarantee this that more than 90 of the people if they do it honestly they will realize that they're already living those leadership principles I actually have a saying which is that um you're probably amazonians are born amazonians they just aren't paid yet and I think that's you know you know you are bored and Amazonian I think that's true I think that's true because yeah because the rigor we go through to prepare for the interview and then the pride that we take in being amazonians is I've I've not seen that kind of pride in the eyes of a lot of other people I I don't want to name organizations but uh we have a different kind of Pride and and I would see uh you know just before I was going to interview I would see people say that you know uh this is how proud We Are we've got our orange badge now we've got our red badge what is going on people are talking about phone tool icons and but the fact of the matter remains well when you get in there is just so much to do it is a world of its own yeah I mean I was I think on one of my lives I did on Monday someone was trying to ask me why is there so much focus on these leadership principles what about you know caring about people who are you know the the followers you know the employees and I was saying no no you've misunderstood what leadership principles are it's not management principles it's how the and then I use the analogy of religion you know it's it's the it's like the Ten Commandments or the pillars of Islam it's of guidance about how Amazon wants its people to live their lives and then I was thinking do you know what that analogy of religion isn't quite so far off as I thought when I started because like you say you know there's there's just things that are very Amazonian like the traditions of Badges and the traditions of stickers and the traditions of phone tools that are very almost well they're cultural dare I say the word yeah yes and I remember uh you know to the point of phone tool I remember uh this was just last week I believe I think it was either Tuesday or Wednesday and someone had shared that they've started a new role and uh someone at a director level and above and the person said I wanted to look up a few people on my uh you know uh business unit and I said okay now where do I look them up because I don't have a phone tool so I don't know who's who so actually we just we need to explain to everyone what phone tool is because I've just realized I've got to know please go ahead yeah so photo is essentially there's an internal directory and I think most organizations have internal directories that you can look people's names up and then in this directory what you can get when you do a certain project or a certain team is something called a phone tool can be created that you can download and put onto your profile on the directory so they're effectively virtual stickers so I'm sure lots of people will look at LinkedIn and we'll see loads of amazonians posting pictures of their laptops with stickers on them there's a virtual equivalent which is a phone tool which is effectively a sticker on your directory and they are much coveted like people literally set themselves goals to get to X many phone tools that's funny yes absolutely and and I think it also uh you know this whole virtual sticker concept also goes to show that we are raising the bar within ourselves yeah and and I remember uh you know you of course when it was Interview whiz right talking about the concept of being a baraser and that is when it's stuck in my head and that is one of my goals so what I also feel is um just having this kind of environment that is built which which pushes us so no one is pushing me essentially the manager is not going to tell me to do something or my skip level manager is not going to tell me to do something but because I see it in my environment I push myself to be better and it's about it's about the hunger and I think that goes back to your preparation and your level of preparation for the internet in the process right you was you were so hungry for it yes yourself and invested the time and put some real intellectual thought and strategic ambition behind your approach to the interview process and like I say I've spoken to a few people and lots of very very different approaches to the preparation process yours is very similar to mine actually I got to your level of repetition and detail and number of examples whereas I know other people perhaps a little less kind of I won't be focused because that's not fair but they structure their approach a bit differently so now you're in your program manager in awesome crazy busy part of the business one of the other things I would love to hear from you is your thoughts on what are the most important leadership principles in your particular role there are obviously important leadership principles that are Universal customer obsession is always Universal deliver results is always Universal you know but from a program manager point of view what would you say based on your experience would be the most important leadership principle that if someone was applying for a program manager role that they should be focusing on sure um so I I will not um generalize it to all program manager roles okay because uh the leadership principles for each PM role could be very dependent for the team that we are working on uh now in my team in my case my customer is not internal to Amazon my customer is external to Amazon however every individual who places an order on Amazon's website is serviced by my customers so customer Obsession for me is vital so while in my role I may want to do multiple other things which I have the opportunity to do I have to be able to learn to tie it back to how it is going to solve the customer's pain point so two very very vital uh leadership principles for my role on the lmaq team are customer Obsession and earning Trust very very Whitely and so this is from an external customer perspective and when I look at it within Amazon itself because we have to work a lot with the tech teams and we have to influence the tech teams so with them it is about having backbone disagree and commit because uh Tech always will have that okay this is our goal for this year right and again using an Amazonian term which is op1 so they will say this is our operational planning for this year and I will go back to them and say okay I agree with that however this is a problem my customer is facing and I need you to resolve it so how do we get to that point where you may not have something in your goal but I need a resolution built I think you make a really good kind of point there where when people are looking to work out the key leadership principles for their roles to prepare I always tell people to go through the job description and you know try and match the words that you're reading to the leadership principle but there's one leadership principle that you could never find in a job description and that's have backbone disagree and commit because No One's Gonna Write that in a job description even living on trust Gigi uh you know on trust is not vocal however it's essential to Everyday working I have to earn the trust with my manager I have to run the trust with my peers I have to earn the trust of my customer I have to earn the trust of my fellow amazonians because we work together yeah to build a solution which in the end not only services are customer but in the end we'll come back to say okay this is what Amazon did and somewhere you've been a part of that piece of news that this is what Amazon did yeah and I think you're right in terms of earn trust is so critical and in my experience as a bar raiser there's nothing that will get a candidate not inclined faster than a red flag on earn trust yes yeah yes absolutely right so how long have you been in Amazon Now remind me I finished one quarter however I tell people that I think I was an Amazonian from the outside before I actually got before I got my Alias because I had an offer as you know last year in April immigration the second covet wave and everything so I've changed three teams two continents uh you know by the time then I actually and and the reason I share this with people is because this is how much I believe in the value system I could have easily said that okay I'm just going to take up another role in India work and figure out whatever happens but it just so happened that I just do that yeah you really wanted it there's no question now you worry I was very clear and uh amongst all of my trials and tribulations my biggest Advantage has been that it allowed me to connect with so many people at Amazon who taught me the concept of a barisa who taught me the concept of you know promotions so when I got into my role I was clear I am looking for this in the first quarter this in the second quarter this after one year this after two years and my manager almost looked at me and said okay do you do you want to be where I am so I said no I don't want your role but you know this is what I want to do so uh so yeah you for anything in life you've got to want it to get it it's true and so it sounds like you you did brilliantly in terms of getting in touch with people on LinkedIn you've got lots of Insider information from the outside I like I love asking this question you sound like you are very prepared for what you were gonna face was there anything that really surprised you then once you actually landed in your role that perhaps you weren't expecting or you weren't expecting to the degree that you got it so uh nothing negative uh what absolutely took me by surprise is the ecosystem we have built at Amazon okay uh what I'm what I'm alluding to is that we instead of going to world as the first say point of writing anything will open a quip oh crap I hate quip right so what I'm saying is that whether we love it or we hate it at the point is that uh and I tell people this that when you get into Amazon the world is very different so why I had a lot of inside information from the outside there was no way I could have fathomed what I was going to see on the inside um you know just the magnanimity of the operation and I'm not speaking the perspective the team that I'm on the amount of data that is available the amount we write I think one of the things that took me by surprise is how much of our everyday work is writing yeah how much of our everyday work is writing because every okay one interesting thing on that point of writing um so one thing I noticed in my initial meetings was okay the meeting is started but everyone is silent and I'm wondering I'm like okay what's going on why is no one saying anything and then I realized that nobody did nobody warn you not that everyone is reviewing a document so the first 15 to 20 minutes of the meeting is Doc review yeah yeah okay and I'm like and it happened with me twice and this was like literally in the first 48 hours because there were some overseas meetings that were scheduled so my managers had just attended and I'm wondering am I on the right meeting and then someone does a time check need a little more time someone says okay we are good to start and I feel that that's a very inclusive process everyone is reading the same document irrespective of the fact that you're a director you are a senior manager you are a program manager it doesn't matter and everyone has an equal opportunity to ask questions or get details if you don't understand something yeah yeah you're right yeah I think you're absolutely right when I think back to access to information to your point about the kind of egalitarianism associated with access to information I don't think I had the same access to the same type of information in my previous company as my VP did whereas you're right in Amazon there's nothing that my VP knew about a particular subject that I couldn't also know either by reading a Wiki reading the document go going into the actual Tableau tool myself exactly you know or getting a query from some someone running it on Hubble anything it's it's an open organization yeah I I that's a really good point actually I hadn't really thought about it from that perspective but it's incredibly egalitarian when it comes to access to information you're right yes well absolutely right so before we wrap up I have one final question for you which is what advice if you only could give candidates out there one piece of advice and you've given them loads of amazing tips and information already but if you were going to just pick one thing to say to them what would it be to prepare for the interview prepare spend some time on it yeah so if so my one piece of advice uh you know if you are going into an Amazon Interview is understand why you want to interview for Amazon Ah that's interesting and why did you say that do you say that from because you think that their interviewer is going to ask them and it's going to matter a lot to the interviewer or are you saying that because you need to know what your motivation is to then invest the time I'm not saying it because the interviewer will ask it I'm saying it because if anyone who has an opportunity to interview at Amazon if they know why Amazon then the preparation becomes that much simpler yeah yeah putting in the amount of effort that you have to put in is a lot easier when you commit it you understand why you're putting yourself through that well I made it sound really bad didn't I why are you put it correct because it requires focused effort yeah absolutely well that's it thank you so much for your time I know you did you were on such an incredibly challenging journey and I'm I've been so impressed with your tenacity we've connected as you say a few times in LinkedIn I watched you kind of go through your interview process and then there was the immigration wobble and then I spotted a few months later quite a few months later that you'd actually landed in Amazon and you were commenting on my LinkedIn stuff so it's always a real thrill for me to see The Journey that people go through and I really appreciate you coming back and sharing it with everyone on the channel thank you so much the the honor and pleasure has been all mine thank you um I'll see you on LinkedIn absolutely thank you so much take care enjoy the rest of your day or evening I suppose you too you too have a wonderful time thank you bye-bye now what you need to do is click the link here to claim your free day-run careers customer Obsession taster course watch that and you'll nail every customer Obsession question asked of you in your Amazon interview or if you want to do that a little bit later why don't you check out more here of our incredible insights and advice on Amazon Interview preparation

Channel: Amazon Interview Whizz @ Day One Careers

Views: 22,840

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Id: PRHXEAGMXnY

Length: 40min 43sec (2443 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022