Two examples for each of Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles

in today's video I'm going to share with you two examples for each of Amazon's 14 leadership principles now to help you to better brainstorm for your own stories and to give a better idea on what's a good answer for a behavioral question during the Amazon interview customer obsession is by far one of the most common leadership principles at Amazon and the easiest question related this principle is tell me how do you show customer obsession however for the sake of a better answer here let me give you another example like for instance tell me about the time you were not able to meet a time commitment and what did you do given that sequence of events so here is one possible answer here one of my clients are in the art gallery business and I manage their online presence now while this is not technically challenging tasks you have to be very very careful because many things happen on short notice and you have to update them through throughout the digital channels and I remember very well in one such instance it was around the New Year's Eve which is by the way very busy period for art galleries that also because an artist was a bit late to provide his materials for for the exhibition but also because my availability was not the best during that time that we unfortunately introduced a small delay in to communicating those those details about his exhibition on the website on our newsletter and throughout our social media channels now luckily enough is his exhibition 112 because he organized it more like a private event however ever since we ensure that we would not only ask for these details even earlier than we used to but will set up a system in place that would ensure that we could we would be able to communicate exhibitions even if artists wouldn't provide us old and older invitation and all the media required to properly showcase their event and by the way the the the gallery owners have just opened the second gallery downtown so the previous example was for entry-level roles now let me share with you another example more suitable for more senior types of position and from project management roles in general I remember that in a previous position as as a project manager for an HR b2b software-as-a-service in the HR industry we were tasked to develop a survey designer that would serve the backbone for a big feature that were multi rater survey now this was quite a huge feature that had multiple engines it has an invitation engine it has a survey designing engine and it also has a reporting engine so as soon as we we were done with an early alpha version of this multi rater surveying software we demoed it to a small sample of our clients and actually contrary to my expectations instead of them being very interested in designing their own service and scoring mechanisms they were a lot more interested in in the reporting section of this feature so we actually had to pivot all our resources into developing it focusing on on that reporting engine and luckily enough that this turned out to be one of the most used feature in our software so if customer obsession was the most popular leadership principle to talk about ownership is a close second and to showcase this let me answer another very common behavioral question tell me about the time you faced a conflict on your team and how did you handle it now one of my clients are in yards business as I just said ancient in the previous example and my main role there was is to manage their digital presence and I remember that the time that they opened the second art gallery downtime for more established artists that we gathered with with the gallery owners and an arts critic you know to decide what would be the best approach to communicate this within a digital context and the art critics position was that if the previous website for for the initial gallery was turned out to be a bit small this one should be particularly big because it should embed as much information as possible in order to to rank as high as possible in Google search results now on the other hand I wasn't that keen on the idea because I had the previous experience from the first year and I know that artists are not the best people to to ask content from and to manage complex projects with because they're the artists after all now the arguer owners the real estate investors so you can imagine that they think big and we in the end we arrived to a conclusion after several meetings that we could actually start small and of course if artists wanted to provide us with more information would be happy to add that on the website and basically the approach would would be here to start small especially given the fact that there is no monetization business going on Trude within an online context here so the business is going great for them and by the way the arts critic is my friend for around five years now and the second example here is for more complex question that not many people realize the behavioral question in the first place do you collaborate well now let me tell you about the time where I let the team of multi cultural developers and I remember very well that a lot of emphasis had to be put on on on great communication there and for this I entered that at first I we developed our own software project management tool especially just to manage our our projects and then I also ensured that I would constantly over communicate with the requirements and talking everything was going well for them this was also especially important because my team was working for me remotely so this prevented us a lot of headaches on the long run and I believe that that and these the this approach of prioritizing a great start were actually the key element to to for this collaboration to be a great success because we worked or together for around seven years now invent and simplify has a very famous question behavioral question as do many interviews that is tell me about a recent piece of innovation that you've done and here is how I would answer it within my own context here the most recent piece of innovation that I've ever done within the past couple of years is with my youtube channel where I found an alternative method to provide recruitment marketing services as opposed to just posting job ads on transactional markets and also the other alternative would have been to post some TV ads where there is no measurability there is no data-driven decision making process so this one turned out quite well for me I mean it's it turned out into a full-time business opportunity and my youtube channel is even doubling month-to-month and but I also provide the coaching services nowadays now another possible question here would be to talk about the situation where you found a creative way to overcome a problem and here's how I would answer it now what project manager at an HR b2b software service we at the point experienced a healthy amount of growth and while this was good for the business our database showed signs of weakness here so the obvious solution was of course to buy to invest into a distributed server system however this was not financially viable for us at that point in time so in turn of whata what I did there was to invent a simple caching mechanism that would ensure that the reports from candidates will be general would be cached like files and then it would have it would be much easier for the other base to handle all this heat and if I this proved to work pretty well for us because we managed to have hundreds of thousands of people within the same server like we we had hundreds of thousand people on the same server with the same database and the same software working together now leaders are right lottie's is probably the trickiest of of the 14 inertia principle it basically means as just what it says that successful people are usually very right a lot of the time and let me give an example here how would answer the question of tell me what the time is stepped up into leadership role so let me tell you about the time when I led a team of around six technical developers for an HR software as-a-service if in the beginning if in the first few years the software won great and we acquired ever more clients that after a certain period of time we experienced a lack of growth and I really felt like it was the right time for me to to step up and assume leadership here and together with my business partner who was an HR professional a technical one to to really try to see what was going on and what could be done within this context and it will be said here I was quite skeptical about about the success of the project myself however after intense discussions and a thorough decision-making process we decided to implement another round of features that would be considered as innovative on my another technical sign on my on my business partners and to try to improve sales and those were actually the the most intense three months of my technical project management career because everyone was feeling a bit demotivated and they they were actually showing their lack of confidence with this project to succeed but luckily for us we we managed to deliver those the sort of technical features very time and within budget and this actually proved to be one of the key elements to to revive the project and essentially have a profitable business going on so if my previous example was geared towards my leadership skills in general let me tell you now another example that is geared more like data-driven decision-making so in applicants throw is a technical project manager for an HR software the the holy grail of the software was to advance the idea that personality profiling would gain momentum within a digital context and we actually developed on this idea for around two years however data was telling a whole different story at that point in time we clearly noticed that it was it was largely becoming a candidate driven market for our industry and we also noticed that many many candidates prefer to give us little information as possible within hiring process of that's how we actually shifted to what I was always an adaptive that is structured hiring processes and data-driven decision-making in general and but this worked pretty well then in our case I mean we had hundreds of thousands of people within our software so learn and be curious is actually not very commonly used as a direct question within Amazon interviews to my knowledge however there are some unique opportunities for you to showcase this one for example if if you're receiving a question such as tell me about the time you you were dealing with conflict on your team one possible answer is let me tell you about the time when I was project manager what I was leading a team of multicultural developers and it happened that one one particularly talented developer was not happy with with the way things were progressing for them and in fact I had no idea about this I found about it by mistake not from my project lead there because they weren't apparently discussing too much about this but because of the fact that was trying to always over communicate with with my team there he somewhat showed reticent to do some changes in the software and he wasn't very communicative so then I try to explore to dive a bit deeper into details and see what was going on and he then in fact told me that he wasn't really happy that he he wasn't the lead the team leader because he was the most talented and he was he said he was really hardworking so then I conducted the me to Lima our team leader and I asked her what was going on and she told me all right this this developer is very talented but he he's he sometimes showing up late at work and he's at times as well feels a bit disconnected with reality so I called a meeting between the three of us and again I try to listen as good as I could all parties and I was actually gave gave my team lead I actually agreed with her that the developer was not particularly good in a leadership role and in fact we tested that particularly talented developer for another project we need leadership position leadership role however he he didn't like it actually and luckily enough he he went on to stay with us as a as a particularly talented developer for another five years and another option to showcase this learn and be curious a principal would be to answer questions such as tell me about the time you missed a solution to not just problem so for this let me tell the story of my youtube channel is if in the beginning there were not many people watching my videos I always did my best to explore to do some extensive a be testing on what could work best in in my case and I've done this in kind of in in a series so first I I used to to speak to the camera whatever I thought was interesting which didn't work out then I started doing a leadership principles which by the way the first video in that series what was Amazon's 14 leadership principles which immediately try started to gain a lot of attention however it wasn't until I believe a good six months after that I realized that it's Amazon is a peculiar company that is the content that's really interesting to people and it's the way to go here so this is the main thing that I wanted to highlight here is that it's this this explore exploratory work that answered the relative success of my YouTube channel I believe that the key to my two successful YouTube channel nowadays always to try to explore more and more options to see what content people would would really want to consume you so while hire and develop the best is probably not the most famous of Amazon's for the leadership principles and it might only be asked for primarily for HR roles there are however some some things that we could exemplify here such as a good question for for this to showcase this type of principle is tell me about the time you motivated the group of individuals so let me tell you about the time where I led the team of multicultural developers and with as within any IT roles you know that turnover is quite high with these things especially if your team is young so what I did here was what I did here to try to keep my members on the team and keep them motivated was to always try to over communicate with them and always try to to show that the work was meaningful for for this project and of course it did happen for me that a team member wanted to leave that were competing to competing business because we couldn't and he actually used use the reason to for his salary to be raised for I don't know 20 percent as the main reason to leave for a competitor but when I said with them and this new gosh and essentially yes negotiated but at that time just discussed what was going on it was another problem that was the root cause of this issue there he wasn't getting along too well with that with the team lead so then I then I got together with my team leader and between the three of us we we decided on on a new on a new management strategy there that would actually work towards empowering the the talented even more than then we used to empower our developers within the team and luckily this negotiation strategy worked quite well in in this case and he went on to stay with us for around two years now another possible example here with with respect to hiring develop the best will be talk about the time where I when I was involved in outsourcing small IT jobs and the actual one of the main factors for the success of this initiative is to really hire and develop the the best possible that the best possible people they could find now of course they are not the best in the world but they are the best in your case and this is what matters most and for this I wasn't sure that I keep a great relationship between between these the two parties and not only this but as the business grew I also ensured that I would hire people not necessarily to work on a given project but to see how would they perform how they could perform within a within a given context and I always only wanted to hire the people that were well connected to the latest trends and with the latest technologies and decided were I delivered over 50 such such projects you now insist on the highest standards is also a pretty common leadership principle to showcase within your within your answers and now how do you show how do you show that you you are serious about these highest standards well one way would be to show that you actually collaborate well because this is very important especially for teams for for companies such as Amazon that have so many teams so here's how I'd answer a question do you collaborate well with keeping this principle in mind so one of my clients are in the art gallery business and I manage their digital presence and while these things are not technically complex the main challenge here is to always ensure that these the information that our artists and our other media outlets provide us to publish through our channels is accurate and to give an example here it's not uncommon for us to receive an invitation for an artist exhibition that is in too low resolution or it is not uncommon for us to have to change the dates for an exhibition on on short notice so this is why we all I had to set up systems in place that would ensure that for instance we I had common calendars with the owners of the gallery just you know to always stay synchronized with what was going on because things can happen a short notice and also try to add a bit of over to add more time to ask artists well in advance to provide to provide us with their with a document so everything could stay updated so luckily but this is going quite well and the art the art gallery owners have just opened the second gallery downtown now another possible question that you may use to showcase this insist on high on the highest standards here will be - we all do things that we wish we could take back at time so tell me about the situation where you wish to it you would have you would have handled the situation differently so let me tell Baltimore managed the theme of multicultural developers specifically when I appointed the new team lead so while she was great technically speaking she was she wasn't too communicative and as my team was working remotely for me I felt like this was this was a pretty serious problem so I decided to coach her and I I started to ask her how she would react into certain situations and I felt like she wasn't really paying too much attention to what I was saying I felt like we were not connecting we were not connecting each other too well so then I started to try to push a bit harder to to see how she what she would do in certain scenarios and because of our situation of the situation becoming pretty tense she actually started to cry and ever since I I learned my lesson to to at first read a bit about the other party's culture and how they how they how they are used to doing things before actually engaging into into more tense such such tense situations but luckily enough she she we work together for round seven for around seven years so think big is another pretty common leadership principle that's getting asked questions about during Amazon interviews and one such question could be tell me about the time you were you were facing a problem that had multiple solutions so let me tell you about the damn world's technical project manager in an HR b2b software or mere my business partner after experiencing around two years of steady growth we felt like that the software was the business was a bit going in starting to go in the wrong direction there so we we analyzed the situation and we we realized that actually the development was going great our developers were providing great quality our clients were also happy so we had to look into other opportunities we had to to find other options to grow our business and for this we applied a lot of qualitative and quantitative analysis here and we actually decided to develop more innovative features and not only that but we also decided that we could invest at the same time into implement into introducing into adding the new sales effort to to add new clients using that set of innovative features as the pitch in that case and yes this proved to be the winning solution in that situation and I believe that the sales grew around 200 percent in in the first two quarters of the next year and another interesting question to test this thing big principles could be tell you all the time where you had to choose between technologies for a project and for this let me tell you about the time where I where I was outsourcing projects from from clients to to my own teams of developers it was always challenging to pick the technology that we will have to get used for a project and the choice was often between the PHP that the freeware version and the dotnet the Microsoft version and the decision who those would often come down to to what type of project it was in the sense that was it a short-term project in which I could maybe use some some components in which case I would often go with the.net version because it it had a lot of ready-made components within this regard or it was a more long-term project that requires a lot of customization in which case I would often go with with the PHP version and by the way there was also the office budget constraint to take into account but I felt like this went quite well because I only believed I believed that it only happened to be once to switch the technology for a project before it's before the project completion because the essential part of this whole thing was to deliver for our clients with with the right type of quality and on time so biased fraction is is also a very common Amazon leadership principle but especially for entry-level roles it often it often goes very well with ownership and for this Dan Ashok is a pretty standard question tell me about the time when you sacrificed short term goals for long term success which by the way is the definition of the ownership principle so probably the best example he would be to talk about my latest business decision that I made with my youtube channel because early in 2090 nest business started growing quite well I had to decide on whether to invest into new tools or to keep doing my videos using my iPhone 7 and this was not an easy decision also because some financial constraints however I decided main priority for me would be to to have a steadier upload schedule on the on the longer-term and if you think about it investing in new tools is wouldn't put me out of business if this turned out to be a bad decision so I decided to go ahead and for this I had to I had to delay my my uploading schedule by I think two or three weeks however this turned out to be a great investment with no loss actually because as soon as I started publishing videos with my new setup not only they are easier to put together and I have more time to investing in this scenario but also there are more views on these videos so in this case this turned out to be as a successful successful solution and the second example to showcase this biased fraction principle would be with another question that I used before that is tell me about the time you were 75% in the project but you had to shift pivot strategies so let me tell you about them when I was project manager for a technical HR b2b software where at one point we decided to integrate as many job boards as possible Windows software to allow our clients to post job as throughout the internet and there are many dozens of such possible job boards however as soon as we integrated the the seven most popular that we knew we we immediately spotted something very interesting that everyone was posting job as through just one of them so we had to we had to suddenly decide to change our strategy from integrating more job boards to integrating it better to integrating them better so we actually decide to integrate that job board as good as good as possible to actually build up we actually became their premium partners after short time and this this sudden shift in focus ensured that we actually gained some pretty good momentum and it turned out that I believe that 90 to 95 percent of jobs were posted to the job board alone which which was to be honest we do very profitable for for us so frugality is a pretty important leadership principle that of accomplishing more with less and for this I believe the best possible question that would showcase this this trait would be tell me about the time when you dealt with ambiguity so let me tell you about the time where my good friends and clients real estate investors started their first arts gallery having I was the guy who knew about IT and they were real estate investors and together with an arts critic we try to arrive to successful compromising in this case so they were dreaming big because there the building that they bought was big the art gallery was also thinking big because he he saw it as an opportunity to to add as much information as possible to the website so they they build their online presence and however on on my end I knew that there was no business plan on this on a digital context that would bring in cash on on the short run even the medium run so it was it was a pretty intense negotiation process because I knew also that if if we start with a large website then the resource is investing the website would would quickly be depleted actually because it was it's not easy to create a huge website so luckily in the end we we arrived a certain compromise to start relatively small and to add more content as as the business evolved and luckily this distant not to work quite well because they are my clients for four six years now and they just opened the second art gallery since and the second example with respect to frugality would be to talk about my first money-making job but that had around 15 years ago and then when the internet was just getting started when I used to to bid and to win many small projects on the internet which I would then outsource to my teams of remote developers but despite the fact that this was pretty much into a cash-strapped environment because I probably couldn't have afforded hiring people full-time they stand out to be quite a valuable thing for the long term because if you see nowadays pretty much any major company has become a significant outsourcing powerhouse so an interesting question the showcase burn trust would be tell me about the time when you received negative feedback from your manager and how do you handle this so I remember in a previous business my we were delivering on HR b2b software I was in charge of the technical part of things and my business partner was an HR veteran and I remember whenever we had to develop new prototypes to four features to be using the software my business partner used to be very picky as to what content was specifically what text and where the buttons would be on that given screen and for this I always did my best to to listen at first as well as I could and then not only that but to provide him with a very early alpha a very rough sketch of this this prototype into which he would add his comments and then instead of showing him the beta version after there his video was done I was done my best to add that little extra touch there to to really try to to innovate a little bit on mind and to become creative so I try to foresee I try to predict what what he would like to happen for for those screens and this helped a lot to mitigate our various disagreements that we sometimes as it is normal head and our business went on for for around six years so if my previous example was talking with a higher-up now let me show Chris an example in which I talked with my direct reports and I within this earn trust context so in a previous Rose the project manager of the team of multicultural developers I always won above and beyond over communicate the project needs and because it was a very challenging environment and we always had changes and various clients of that requested many different things and changed their mind a lot it would it would happen at times that we had misunderstandings within our own team and people that were simply not happy with with how things were going because things were to fluid at times even even if the team was young so for this I wasn't sure that I always employed diplomatic stands here I always listen to everyone I always tried not to rush decisions and basically it also encouraged them to talk between them because you know developers tend to be introverts and luckily this worked quite well in this in this scenario we work together for around seven years so the idea is another important leadership principles at Amazon and the first example will be straightforward I mean the idea could also be used in a leadership context that you communicate it effectively with all the members of your team in order to see what was one point what went well and what didn't so let me just quickly showcase an example in 15 seconds so as a project manager of multicultural team of young developers I was in charge of handling communications and communicating my client requests to my team of developers and for this we to ensure the successful collaboration I also tasked them to design our own project management software and I ensured that I'd communicate almost on a daily basis with every one of them to basically over communicate and also be diplomatic within within our relationship so of course you know we had it happened that we had challenges however our business relationship went on for four seven years now for the second example here I believe this is the the interesting the interesting example to give here because it applies to many many types of of engineering roles within within Amazon and the most interesting question here is tell me about time you use data to develop a strategy so let me tell you about them when I was project manager for an HR b2b software which I also designed and while designing the software also ensured that I would design some reports that would give me a good level of analysis on to what worked and what not in within the software and I remember very well in what's once on one such instance that we had tracked the pass rate within each step of the hiring process that we had in the software and I remember one such key metric of the pass rate for first step called the personality profiling was particularly low compared to the others so we had to take a closer look at that step in order to see what was going on and luckily enough by employing both this type of quantitative analysis through the report but also qualitative analysis with my business partner who was an HR veteran and we luckily we decided to make the step optional which in turn allowed us to to have it to have our pass rate increase but I think three times immediately just because of that analysis you so have backbone disagree on committees another very very interesting leadership principle is Amazon especially for senior roles and the main reason for this to happen is because many of the questions during the behavioral interview are such as we all have to deal with people that don't like us tell me all the time you had to deal with such a person how did you handle the situation so for this let me tell you about the time when I was having business relationship with my partner for an HR b2b business and his values were particularly more conservative than mine so at first I often ensured that I thoroughly listened to what he had to say because also it was the language difference so I thought it was really really important for me to understand what he was what he was talking about then also key to to developing our relationship was to act diplomatic at all times now setting this leadership component aside I would always ensure that I looked deep into into the data and try to try to validate what he said with with some something factual some sort of metrics and of course then present that that data to him and it did happen that he didn't agree with my rationing even if the data was telling a different story so I had to simply deliver on what he suddenly it was finally it happened for him to also also be right with these things and also our business relationship developed for around five years and this helped me quite a lot to understand how to deal with with other people from whose values are different than than mine so now another example here with respect to probably the same types of questions where a time where they disagreed with somebody so at the time I my good friends and clients real estate investors started their first arts gallery together with an arts critic we had to decide the strategy for their online presence and you know real estate investors tend to think big so do so the art critics because you know that's that's basically the way of doing things however myself being and in information technology understand the challenges of developing a huge website with little resources and no no actual no actual business plan within a digital context there was no idea to monetize this communication in a digital context and despite the fact that I I warned them that this was going to happen actually went ahead and did a pretty decent decently sized website at first I mean we had six pages for each artist exhibiting in the gallery six pages on the website and this however with time we we realized they actually realized the situation was no longer that's sustainable and nowadays you only have one page for for these artists but so to be clear here we're talking about a success story here because they only recently opened the second art gallery downtown so the last leadership principles deliver results is also not the least important this is used quite extensively especially for senior roles so one particularly interesting question behavioral question for this for this principle is tell me about a hard goal that you have set and achieved so for this let me tell you about a time where I was project manager for a confidential business for around 5 years so if in the first 2 years business was going great then the project started moving in the wrong direction and I really felt like the project was beginning to be at the crossroads so I called a meeting with my business part and with the other stakeholders of the project and together we decided with a very narrow majority here to implement a given set of features and we gave ourselves the land of three months to implement those and then we'd see how this project would evolve so I remember even today that this was the most challenging the most challenging time that I managed the technical project in my career and I I always had to motivate to remote evade my team me pretty much every day because they also they were also seeing what was going on and some clients were even leaving meanwhile and the the bread and butter of my example is that communication in this case proved to be a vital element to help my team to deliver on what on what we promised we we do and despite the fact that actually some of the members of my own team left during the project during those intense 3 months of development we were luckily we managed to deliver on the project's specifications before deadline I remember we finished one month early and with the right quality so this proved to be a very very important step in in in that business that fortunately enough started started in the right direction and the second example here with respect to this leadership principle of delivering results it's not answer question do you collaborate well so these are these are more on the leadership side of stories here so let me tell you about the story when I let the team of multicultural developers we were tasked of handling various client requests and for as I knew this was going to be a longer project because I hired them for the long term I first ensured that I designed software together with them just to manage our software development and I also used another trick here that is because of our internal connection wasn't allowing video calls at that time we used text through Skype and we used a 12 an advantage in the sense that we tracked all communications and we'd use that in order to debug any misunderstanding and any problems should they arise and this was actually one of the the vital elements of the success of many other projects because our client was also not we're not providing us the clearest specifications possible and they would often often rightfully change their mind but by over communicating and keeping diplomacy with within a team context we we managed to deliver on on many projects this way and they actually worked for me for around seven years so just a few closing notes here notice that throughout the video I only employed a handful of examples and by the end of the video I believe there was quite a lot of overlap that made the video a bit boring to watch right so the same the same thing applies for Amazon interviews and especially for us senior roles that went all the way to the loop so if you if you are on the loop you're going to be four five or six hours of continuous interviewing and 50% of that is behavioral interviewing so you can imagine that this video was not even one hour long so if you have to speak for hours about these behaviors there will be overlap going on so my point here is to prepare more stories if you can for for your interview then other than this there's some pretty common-sense advice here like don't use we did this but use I did this and it will take you a little bit of time to get used to these things but so long as you're aware of them I think you should be fine and also for the failure stories try to highlight the the last part the results part of your star runs or not do not talk too much of the failure and don't be negative don't don't ever end a story on a negative note because that's that's setting up the wrong trigger for the follow-up question because you've just ended on negative note your interview won't make your gift and say hey but you did this no they want to see what went wrong there right because their job is to identify weaknesses within your profile because the theory of behavioral interviewing is just to look at your past behavior now to predict your future behavior right now other than that I believe it's pretty much all common sense if you look here and you of course get better once you practice these things however I would always answer that I'd keep these my answers under 1 maybe 1/2 minutes long again this is this a matter of practice as well so as always I hope you found this information useful and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Dan Croitor

Views: 182,045

Rating: 4.6914177 out of 5

Keywords: Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Are right. A lot, Learn and Be Curious, Hire and Develop the Best, Insist on the Highest Standards, Think Big, Bias for Action, Frugality, Earn Trust, Dive Deep, Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit, Deliver Results, job interviews

Id: RzlUQCy84rQ

Length: 48min 36sec (2916 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 17 2019