Product manager interviews at Amazon differ from interviews at other FAANG companies.
Instead of the usual product sense and analytical questions, Amazon interviewers will focus almost exclusively on behavioral questions. They want to see that your way of working aligns with their 16 leadership principles, with a particular focus on ownership and customer obsession.
To help you prepare, we’ve put together this complete guide to the Amazon product manager interview, including 83 interview questions reported by real Amazon PM candidates, as well as an overview of the interview process.
Let’s get started.
Click here to practice with Amazon PM ex-interviewers
1. Amazon Product Manager Role and Salary↑
Before we cover your PM interviews at Amazon, let's take a quick look at the role itself (alternatively, feel free to skip straight to the sections on the interview process or interview questions).
1.1 What does an Amazon product manager do?
Amazon Product Managers (PMs) function at the critical intersection where state-of-the-art technology meets an unparalleled scale of business operations. This comes with some formidable challenges.
"A PM at Amazon is expected to advance ideas that will advance Amazon's strategic objectives. Amazon's global scale means that these initiatives often need approval from leadership, who themselves are in charge of billion-dollar business units. These leaders have their own strategic priorities, risk tolerance levels, and operational concerns to manage. Therefore, the role of an Amazon PM not only involves idea generation but also extends to include exceptional persuasive skills, internal lobbying, and relationship management to secure the necessary support." (Nishant, ex-Amazon product manager).
Stakeholder management on a global scale might be new to you if you're coming from a small or medium company, but it's similar to what PMs might experience at Google, Meta, etc.
However, the product manager position at Amazon differs from PM roles at other FAANG companies in three key ways:
First, decision-making at the company is extremely data-driven, from product development to growth strategies and corporate culture. Amazon PMs are encouraged to use a scoring model as their guide to making good product decisions.
Second, unlike Google and Meta, Amazon uses a top-down decision-making structure, giving the executive team a relatively high degree of control. This more formalized approach to decision-making is exemplified in the way reading documents has become an ingrained part of Amazonian work culture. PMs author their ideas through a 'PRFAQ' document.
Thirdly, Nishant explains that customer obsession is hugely important at Amazon. "The most important job for a PM is to be the voice of the customer in all internal discussions and meetings. Potential PMs aspiring for a job at Amazon should be able to articulate a clear job history and career trajectory marked by initiatives centered around Customer Obsession".
For that reason, customer obsession is the leadership principle you'll want to most focus on when preparing for the interview, as you'll see in section 3.
What does Amazon look for in product managers?
Amazon looks for product managers with traits that align with the company’s culture and values, expressed in its leadership principles. Specifically, Amazon wants product managers who are knowledgeable about its products, data-driven, results-driven, highly user-centric, and adaptable.
1.2 Amazon product manager levels
These are the different Amazon Product Manager levels:
- Associate Product Manager (L5) typically has 3-7 years of product management experience.
- Senior Product Manager (L6) typically has 6-13 years of product management experience.
- Principal Product Manager (L7) typically has 10-20 years of product management experience.
1.3 Salary and compensation
Amazon PMs make 34% more than other PMs in the US on average, according to Glassdoor.
Compensation mainly depends on two key factors: location and level.
Location: Salaries are adjusted for cost-of-living. For example, Amazon PMs in the US make 314% more than their counterparts in India.
Level: As you'd expect, both base salary and total compensation go up with each PM level.
Below is the average salary and compensation of the different product manager levels at Amazon. This is based on the reported data from Levels.fyi.
If you’re unsure what level you’re being considered for, ask your recruiter.
Ultimately, how you do in your interviews will determine what level you’re offered. That’s why hiring one of our Amazon PM interview coaches can provide such a significant return on investment.
And remember, compensation packages are always negotiable, even at Amazon. So, if you do get an offer, don’t be afraid to ask for more.
1.4 The Bar Raiser Interview
The Bar Raiser Interview is usually the last part of the interview stages. This is a unique and important aspect of the Amazon hiring process, serving as an additional layer of evaluation and focusing on Amazon's leadership principles. So, make sure to familiarize yourself with those principles.
The Bar Raiser will not be introduced to you explicitly as such during the interview but will normally ask behavioral and leadership questions.
Note that the Bar Raiser is an Amazon employee whose primary responsibility is to ensure that the company maintains a high standard for talent. This is a third-party interviewer who is not related to the team and normally comes from a different Amazon department.
Essentially, the Bar Raiser is brought into the hiring process to provide objective insights without having to consider the team’s needs. Their primary focus is to maintain the "Amazonian" culture.
For a closer look at the Bar Raiser, read our article: 5 Steps to Beat the Amazon Bar Raiser
2. Interview Process and Timeline ↑
What's the Amazon PM interview process and timeline? The good news is that Amazon works a bit quicker than the other FAANG companies. The process takes four to six weeks on average and follows these steps:
- Job application
- HR Recruiter email or call
- Phone screening (1-2 interviews)
- Writing assessment
- Interview loop (~5 interviews)
- Hiring committee review
- You get an offer!
Note that the process at AWS follows similar steps.
If you are interviewing for a product leadership position (VP, Director, Group PM), learn more about the process and how to prepare by checking out our product leader interview guide.
Let's take a look at each step in more detail.
2.1 What to expect at each stage
Resume screening
First, recruiters will look at your resume and assess if your experience matches the open position. This is the most competitive step in the process—we’ve found that ~90% of candidates don’t make it past this stage.
You can use this free product manager resume guide to help tailor your resume to the position you’re targeting.
If you’re looking for expert feedback, you can also get input from our team of ex-Amazon recruiters, who will cover what achievements to focus on (or ignore), how to fine-tune your bullet points, and more.
HR Recruiter coordination
Next, the interview process starts with an HR recruiter call or email. They are looking to confirm that you've got a chance of getting the job at all, so you should be prepared to explain your background and why you’re a good fit at Amazon.
Phone screen(s)
Your phone screen will last 60 minutes. It will include behavioral questions that test whether you fit Amazon's leadership principles and more functional questions around your product manager experience and your motivation for the role.
The phone screen will typically be with senior members of the product team, including the hiring manager leading your recruitment.
Example phone screen questions:
- Why do you want to work at Amazon?
- How do you deal with ambiguity?
- Can you give me an example of a time you failed to convince someone?
- Tell me about an instance you had issues with meeting a deadline - how did you deal with it?
Some candidates will also face a case study interview in the phone screen stage. This could be where you present a case study of a project you worked on in the past, or you might be asked to study a business case in a spreadsheet and present your findings.
Don't worry, we'll help you prepare for these questions in section 3.
Writing assessment
If your phone screen goes well, you'll be given a writing exercise to complete in your own time. For example, a recent candidate was asked to create a PRD for a fictional Amazon product.
You'll usually be given the writing assessment 48 hours before your onsite/loop interviews. Interviewers at your onsite interviews should have read your writing assessment although it seems that this isn't always the case.
Click here if you want help with your writing assessment.
Onsite interviews / Loop
The next step is to spend a full day at one of Amazon’s offices and participate in ~5 interviews. These interviews will last ~55 minutes and be one-on-one with a mix of people from the team you’re applying to join, including peers, the hiring manager, and a senior executive. Each interviewer is usually assigned 2-3 leadership principles to focus on during the interview.
As mentioned in section 2, one of your last interviews will be with what Amazon calls a “Bar Raiser”. These interviewers are not associated with the team you’re applying for and focus more on overall candidate quality than specific team needs. They get special training to make sure Amazon’s hiring standards stay high and don’t degrade over time, so they are a big barrier between you and the job offer.
2.2 What happens behind the scenes
Your recruiter is leading the process and taking you from one stage to the next. Here's what happens at each of the stages described above:
- After the phone screen, your hiring manager decides to move you to the on-site or not, depending on how well you've done up to that point
- During the on-site, interviewers will test your culture fit using the Amazon Leadership Principles, and the Bar Raiser plays a critical role in the group’s final decision
- Your recruiter should be in touch within 5 days of your on-site interviews, either with an offer or to break the bad news.
It's also important to note that recruiters and people who refer you have little influence on the overall process. They can help you get an interview at the beginning but that's about it.
2.3 How technical do you need to be?
Broadly speaking Amazon has two product roles: Product Managers (PMs) and Product Managers - Technical (PMTs).
PMs work for the e-commerce arm of the company and tend to come from a wide range of backgrounds. You don't need to have a technical background to be a PM at Amazon like you usually would at Google.
PMTs work on more technical products such as AWS and are required to have deeper technical knowledge. In most cases, they have a background in computer science or engineering.
"PMTs are deep technology experts and are required to understand architectural choices and defend them." (Nishant, ex-Amazon PM)
As a result, PMTs tend to be paid 15 to 20% more than PMs.
Both roles run very similar hiring processes, and you can expect the same type of questions. The main difference is that if you are applying for a PMT role, you will be asked some technical questions such as, “What is virtualization?” or, “What’s the difference between a router and a switch?” These questions aren’t a test of your coding ability, as they focus on assessing how deeply you understand certain technical concepts — especially system architecture.
If you’re applying for a PM role but discuss technical projects in your behavioral interviews, then you may be offered a PMT role. Also, if offered a PM role, some teams might let you request to apply for a PMT role. In that case, the recruiter will typically arrange an additional interview which will be more focused on technical questions. Your original PM offer will not be rescinded even if you do not clear the technical round.
Note: for the rest of this article we will be loosely referring to PMs and PMTs as Product Managers or PMs given the recruiting process is very similar for both positions.
2.4 How many PMs does Amazon hire every year?
At this point, you might be wondering what your chances are. The good news is that Amazon is such a huge company, with over 1.5 million employees, that it has to hire a large number of PMs every year, even just to replace churn.
It's difficult to put an exact number on it, but let's do some back-of-the-envelope estimations:
At the time of writing, there were 362 Amazon product manager positions on LinkedIn (around 3x more positions than Google). 90% of these positions were labeled as having been posted in the last 2 weeks. Some of the positions would have been posted earlier but since been updated...let's be conservative and say that Amazon posts 360 PM positions per month.
We can therefore calculate that Amazon posts around 4,000 product manager job offers per year. That's a huge number! And probably number 1 among FAANG companies.
Of course, that doesn't mean that getting in is easy. In a 1998 letter to shareholders, CEO Jeff Bezos wrote, “Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success.” This idea is likely why they have Bar Raisers to this day, and why they have a challenging interview process overall.
The good news is that cracking PM interviews is actually very manageable once you know how to prepare. So, let's take a look at the different ways Amazon will ask you questions during interviews.
3. Example questions ↑
As we mentioned at the start of this guide, Amazon interviews focus almost exclusively on behavioral or "STAR" questions. We know this because as well as talking to Amazon PM ex-interviewers, we've analyzed hundreds of questions reported by former PM candidates on Glassdoor.com since 2021.
Each behavioral question from your Amazon interviewer will test you on one or more of Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles.
PM interviews tend to primarily focus on the first four principles we have highlighted below, according to our analysis and the Amazon ex-interviewers on our coaching team. The other twelve topics also come up but less frequently.
Amazon's Leadership Principles:
- Customer Obsession
- Ownership
- Bias for Action
- Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
- Invent and Simplify
- Dive Deep
- Are Right, A Lot
- Deliver Results
- Think Big
- Hire and Develop the Best
- Frugality
- Learn and Be Curious
- Insist on the Highest Standards
- Earn Trust
- Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
- Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
Below is a breakdown of each leadership principle and how you’ll be asked about them during your interview process with Amazon.
3.1.1 Customer obsession interview questions
“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.”
Customer obsession is about empathy. Interviewers want to see that you understand the consequences that every decision has on customer experience. You need to know who the customer is and their underlying needs, not just the tasks they want done.
This is by far the most important leadership principle used at Amazon. Therefore, it is the most important one to prepare for.
Example customer obsession questions asked by Amazon
- Describe a customer feedback recommendation that you implemented
- How have you measured customer satisfaction in the past?
- Which company has the best customer service and why?
- Tell me about a time you worked backwards from a customer problem — how did you solve it?
- Tell me about a time you said no to a customer request and why
3.1.2 Ownership interview questions
“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.”
Interviewers at Amazon want to avoid hiring people who think, “That’s not my job!” When answering ownership questions, you’ll want to prove that you take initiative, can make tough decisions, and take responsibility for your mistakes.
Example ownership questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a time when you established a vision for a team, project, or initiative when there wasn’t one. How did you gain buy-in? What was the outcome?
- Tell me about a time you had to face a situation where you saw a bigger opportunity than what your manager requested
- When was the last time that you sacrificed a long term value to complete a short term task?
- Tell me about a time you took ownership of a problem that was not the focus of your organization
3.1.3 Bias for action interview questions
“Bias for Action — Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking.”
Since Amazon likes to ship quickly, they also prefer to learn from doing and measuring over performing user research and making projections. They want to see that you can take calculated risks and move things forward whenever possible.
Example bias for action questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a time you broke a complex problem into simple sub-parts
- Describe a time you struggled to meet a deadline
- Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with incomplete information. How did you make it and what was the outcome?
- Tell me about a time when you proactively identified a risk in a process and acted upon it?
3.1.4 Have backbone; disagree and commit interview questions
“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.”
Any group of smart leaders will disagree at some point. Amazon wants to see that you know when to challenge ideas and escalate problems to senior leadership. At the same time, they want to know you can sense the right time to move forward regardless of your disagreement.
Example have backbone; disagree and commit questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with your team but decided to go ahead with their proposal
- When was the last time you were challenged in public, and how did you handle it?
- Describe a time when you disagreed with your manager
- Tell me about a time you gave up on a short-term benefit in favor of a long-term benefit
3.1.5 Invent and simplify interview questions
“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." Because we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.”
Amazon relies on a culture of innovation. Answering invent and simplify questions is an opportunity to show your ability to create solutions when there is no obvious answer. You’ll also want to show that you know how to execute big ideas as simply and cheaply as possible.
Example invent and simplify questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a time you re-designed a process and why
- What is the most innovative product you’ve ever built?
- Tell me how you brought a product to market, give specific details
- Tell me about a time when you resolved a complex problem with a simple solution
3.1.6 Dive deep interview questions
“Dive Deep — Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.”
When something isn’t working, Product Managers need to quickly find a solution. Interviewers want to see that you are excited to dive deep when problems arise.
Example dive deep questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a project in which you had to deep dive into analysis
- Describe an instance when you used a lot of data in a short period of time
- Tell me about the most complex analysis you have worked on
- Tell me about a time you used customer data to develop a product or business insight
3.1.7 Are right, a lot interview questions
“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.”
Organizations expect Product Managers to produce solutions as quickly as possible and make a lot of decisions with little information. You’ll want to demonstrate skill in taking calculated risks and comfort with disproving your own beliefs before moving ahead.
Example are right, a lot questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a time you applied judgment to a decision when data was not available
- When was a time that you failed at work?
- Tell me about a time when you had to run a project that was heavily opposed
3.1.8 Deliver results interview questions
“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.”
Amazon values action over perfection. When answering questions related to delivering results, you’ll want to indicate that you dislike slipped deadlines and failed goals.
Example deliver results questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a challenge on a project you faced, how you dealt with it, what was your role, and what was the outcome
- Tell me about a time when you set a product roadmap and it got derailed
- How do you prioritize in your current role?
- What do you think are the most difficult parts of software product management?
3.1.9 Think big interview questions
“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.”
Amazon is huge and its PMs need to build products that reach significant scale to make a difference for the business. As a result, interviewers will want to see that you can develop and articulate a bold vision.
Example think big questions asked by Amazon
- Describe a time you proposed a non-intuitive solution to a problem and how you identified that it required a different way of thinking
- Give a specific example where you drove adoption for your vision and explain how you knew it had been adopted by others
- What is your superpower?
- Tell me about your most significant accomplishment. Why was it significant?
3.1.10 Hire and develop the best interview questions
“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.”
As mentioned above, Amazon wants new hires to, “raise the bar.” Interviewers will want to see that you are not afraid of working with and hiring people smarter than you. You should also show you enjoy coaching younger colleagues and know how to get the most out of top performers. You’ll notice the examples listed here are general interview questions, but they provide a perfect opportunity for you to address this principle.
This leadership principle is typically discussed in interviews for very senior product positions that involve people management or building a team (e.g. Senior Manager for Product Management, Director, etc.).
Example hire and develop the best questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a time you hired or worked with people smarter than you are
- Tell me about a time when you brought different perspectives together to solve a problem
- Why do you want to work at Amazon?
- Demonstrate how you align with the Amazon leadership philosophy
3.1.11 Frugality interview questions
“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.”
At every touchpoint, Amazon tries to provide customers with as much value for as little cost as possible. Interviewers will be looking for how you can support this idea while maintaining a constant drive for innovation.
Example frugality questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a time you successfully delivered a project without a budget or resources
- Describe the last time you figured out a way to save on expenses
- When managing a budget, what are some ways you get more out of less?
3.1.12 Learn and be curious interview questions
“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.”
Amazon demands constant improvement in every part of its business. You’ll want to show that you are interested in learning new things and exploring new ideas. Some examples listed here are general interview questions, but they provide a perfect opportunity for you to address this principle.
Example learn and be curious questions asked by Amazon
- Explain something interesting you’ve learned recently
- Tell me about a time you taught yourself a skill
- Why Product Management?
3.1.13 Insist on the highest standards interview questions
“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 drive 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.”
Amazon takes the view that nothing is ever “good enough.” They’d like to see that you push for standards that are difficult to meet.
Example insist on the highest standards questions asked by Amazon
- Describe a project that you wish you had done better and how you would do it differently today
- Tell me about a time when you were unsatisfied with the status quo. What did you do to change it? Were you successful?
- Tell me about the most successful project you've done
- How do you ensure standards are met when delivering projects?
3.1.14 Earn trust interview questions
“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 odour smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.”
The key part of that principle candidates often miss is the “vocally self-critical.” Amazon wants PMs who focus on fixing mistakes instead of figuring out who to blame. You’ll want to show that you take action when something is wrong and acknowledge your own faults before blaming other people and teams.
Example earn trust questions asked by Amazon
- How do you earn trust with a team?
- Tell me a piece of difficult feedback you received and how you handled it
- A co-worker constantly arrives late to a recurring meeting. What would you do?
3.1.15 Strive to be Earth's best employer interview questions
“Strive to be Earth's best employer — Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.”
Similar to the principle “hire and develop the best,” this principle is more likely to come up in interviews for senior and/or managerial positions. In this case, you’ll want to show that you’ll not only boost your team, but also create a safe, diverse, and just work environment. Essentially, if “hire and develop the best” means picking and training a top team, being “Earth’s best employer” means keeping that team safe, enriched, and engaged once you’ve got them.
Example strive to be Earth's best employer questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a time when you improved morale and productivity on your team. What were the problems, and what was the outcome?
- Tell me about a time you saw an issue that would negatively impact your team. How did you deal with it?
- How do you manage a low performer in the team? How do you identify a good performer in the team and help in their career growth?
3.1.16 Success and scale bring broad responsibility interview questions
“Success and scale bring broad responsibility — We started in a garage, but we're not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.”
Amazon wants its employees to understand the responsibility of working for a vast, impactful company. Show how you measure the impact of your decisions, both in your workspace and in the world around you (e.g. sustainability, justice, etc.). You must always be willing to improve.
Example success and scale bring broad responsibility questions asked by Amazon
- Tell me about a time when you advocated for someone with less power than you
- Give me an example of when you made a decision which impacted the team or the company
- Can you tell me a decision that you made about your work that you regret now?
3.2 Technical questions (for PMTs)
If you're applying for a Product Manager - Technical position, you'll face plenty of technical questions. In fact, some PMT interviews can be just as technical as a Software Development Manager interview.
As we already mentioned, you can expect to face at least one system design interview, however, you will not face any coding interviews.
You may also be asked to explain technical concepts relevant to the team you may be joining. For more information on how to answer these questions, check our articles on how to answer how to answer technical questions.
Example technical questions asked by Amazon
- Explain ACID transactions
- Describe how to implement a scalable web service architecture, like Amazon.com
- For AWS roles: What is virtualization?
4. How to answer ↑
Now you have a sense of the type of questions you can expect in your interview, let's look at how you should answer them.
4.1 Use a framework
When answering behavioral questions, you should always use an answer framework. Amazon even shares this useful PDF with the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) framework laid out for you.
STAR is fine and easy to use. However, experience has shown us that it's not necessarily the optimal approach for behavioral questions.
Why not? Because candidates often find it difficult to distinguish the difference between steps two and three, or task and action.
Plus, many also forget to include Lessons learned, which is often the most crucial part of the answer.
So we’ve developed the SPSIL method to correct some of the pitfalls we’ve observed when using the STAR method.
Let’s step through our suggested five-step approach:
- Situation: Start by giving the necessary context of the situation you were in. Describe your role, the team, the organization, the market, etc. You should only give the minimum context needed to understand the problem and the solution in your story. Nothing more.
- Problem: Outline the problem you and your team were facing.
- Solution: Explain the solution you came up with to solve the problem. Step through how you went about implementing your solution, and focus on your contribution over what the team / larger organization did.
- Impact: Summarize the positive results you achieved for your team, department, and organization. As much as possible, quantify the impact.
- Lessons: Conclude with any lessons you might have learned in the process.
You’ll notice that this method covers very similar themes to the STAR method. We like it because a lot of the candidates we work with find this framework easier to use, as there’s no overlap between any of the steps in your story.
You should practice using whatever method you’re the most comfortable with.
4.2 Demonstrate product management skills
As well as testing you on the leadership principles, Amazon interviewers will want to see the following product manager competencies demonstrated in your answers:
- Product Development Cycle: Show you understand the entire process of creating a product, from generating ideas to launching it and handling post-launch activities.
- Methodologies: Talk about your involvement in each stage of product development and the methods you've used, such as Agile or Scrum.
- Industry Insight: Show that you grasp what's happening in your industry, including competition and current market trends.
- Vision Alignment: Clearly explain your vision for the product and how it fits with your company's overall objectives.
- Communication Skills: Highlight your effective communication skills, especially when explaining complex concepts to different people involved.
- Problem-Solving: Share stories of how you've solved problems in past roles and what you've learned from those experiences.
- Prioritization Approach: Be prepared to discuss how you decide what problems to tackle first and how you go about solving them.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Stress your ability to collaborate with different teams, like engineers, designers, marketers, and salespeople.
- Successful Collaborations: Provide examples of times when you've successfully worked with others and helped them achieve their goals.
- User-Centric Approach: Show that you prioritize the needs of users when managing products.
- User Feedback: Explain how you collect feedback from users and use it to make decisions about the product's direction.
- Data-Informed Decisions: Discuss your experience in using data to guide your decisions about products.
- Tool Proficiency: Demonstrate your proficiency in using relevant tools and analyzing data.
- Leadership Influence: Describe situations where you've taken charge and influenced decisions, even when you didn't have formal authority.
- Team Motivation: Share how you've motivated teams and stakeholders to get behind your vision for a product.
4.3 Demonstrate stakeholder management skills
Amazon also highlights stakeholder management as a crucial part of what product managers have to do. As you prepare your stories, keep the following aspects in mind:
5. Preparation Plan ↑
Now that you know what's required of you, let's focus on how you can get there.
Below, you’ll find links to free resources and four introductory steps to help you prepare for your Amazon PM interviews.
5.1 Deep dive into the product/organization
As you've probably figured out from the example questions listed above, you can't become a PM at Amazon without being familiar with the company's products and its organization. You'll therefore need to do some homework before your interviews.
Here are some resources to help you get started with this:
- Amazon annual reports, proxies, and shareholder letters (by Amazon)
- Amazon strategy teardown (by CB Insights)
- Amazon vision and mission analysis (by Panmore Institute)
- Amazon Overview (by trueup)
5.2 Learn a consistent method for answering PM interview questions
As mentioned previously, Amazon will ask you behavioral questions to test you on its leadership principles as well as to assess your product management and stakeholder management abilities.
Read our guide on Amazon behavioral interview questions to learn how to prepare your stories using the STAR or SPSIL framework.
Once you’re in command of the subject matter, you’ll want to practice answering questions. But by yourself, you can’t simulate thinking on your feet or the pressure of performing in front of a stranger. Plus, there are no unexpected follow-up questions and no feedback.
That’s why many candidates try to practice with friends or peers.
5.3 Practice with peers
If you have friends or peers who can do mock interviews with you, that's an option worth trying. It’s free, but be warned, you may come up against the following problems:
- It’s hard to know if the feedback you get is accurate
- They’re unlikely to have insider knowledge of interviews at your target company
- On peer platforms, people often waste your time by not showing up
For those reasons, many candidates skip peer mock interviews and go straight to mock interviews with an expert.
5.4 Practice with experienced PM interviewers
In our experience, practicing real interviews with experts who can give you company-specific feedback makes a huge difference.
Find an Amazon product manager interview coach so you can:
- Test yourself under real interview conditions
- Get accurate feedback from a real expert
- Build your confidence
- Get company-specific insights
- Learn how to tell the right stories, better.
- Save time by focusing your preparation
Landing a job at a big tech company often results in a $50,000 per year or more increase in total compensation. In our experience, three or four coaching sessions worth ~$500 make a significant difference in your ability to land the job. That’s an ROI of 100x!
