Two examples for each of Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles

In today's video, I'm going to share with you two

examples

of

each

of Amazon's 14

leadership

principles

to help you better brainstorm your own stories and give you a better idea of ​​what is a good answer for a behavioral question during Amazon interview. Customer obsession is by far one of the most common

leadership

principles

at Amazon and the easiest question related to this principle is tell me, how do you display customer obsession? However, to get a better answer, let me give you another example, such as tell me. about the time you couldn't meet a time commitment and what you did given that sequence of events, so here's a possible answer.

One of my clients is in the art gallery business and I now manage his online presence while this is not the case. In technically challenging tasks you have to be very careful because many things happen at short notice and you have to update them through digital channels and I remember very well that in one of those cases it was around New Year's Eve, which by the way is very busy period for art galleries, also because an artist was a little late in providing his materials for the exhibition, but also because my availability was not the best during that time, unfortunately we introduced a small delay in communicating those details about his exhibition. on the website in our newsletter and on our social media channels, now fortunately there is his 112th exhibition because he organized it more as a private event;

However, we have since made sure that not only would we ask for these details even earlier than we used to, but we will also do so. Establish a system that ensures that we can communicate exhibitions even if artists did not provide us with increasingly older invitations and all the necessary means to properly showcase their event and, by the way, the gallery owners. I just opened the second gallery in the center, so the example above was for entry level roles. Now let me share with you another example more suitable for higher level positions and project management roles in general.

I remember in a previous role as a Project Manager for a b2b HR software as a service in the HR industry. We were tasked with developing a survey designer that would serve as the backbone for a big feature that was a multi-rater survey. Now this was a pretty big feature that had multiple engines. it has an invitation engine, it has a survey design engine and it also has a reporting engine, so as soon as we finished with an initial alpha version of this multi-rater survey software, we demonstrated it to a small sample of our customers and, in fact, the opposite. according to my expectations, instead of being very interested in designing their own service and scoring mechanisms, they were much more interested in the reporting section of this feature, so we had to focus all our resources on developing it, focusing in that reporting engine and Fortunately, this turned out to be one of the most used features in our software, so if customer obsession was the most popular leadership principle to talk about ownership, it's second and to show this , let me answer another very common behavioral question.

The time you faced a conflict in your team and how you handled it, now one of my clients is in the landscaping business, as I just said in the example above, and my main role there was to manage their digital presence and I remember that the moment When they opened the second art gallery, down time for more established artists, we met with the gallery owners and an art 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 the initial gallery turned out to be a bit small.

This one should be particularly large because it should include as much information as possible to get the highest possible ranking in Google search results. Now, on the other hand, I wasn't very interested in the idea because I had previous experience from the first year and I know that artists are not the best people to ask for content and manage complex projects because, after all, it is the artists who now they argue. the owners, the real estate investors, so you can imagine they think big and in the end we came to the conclusion after several meetings that we could actually start small and of course if the artists wanted to give us more information , they would be happy to add it. on the website and basically the approach would be to start small, especially considering the fact that there is no monetization business on Trude within an online context here, so business is going very well for them and, by the way, the art critic is my friend. for about five years now and the second example here is for a more complex question where not many people realize the behavioral question in the first place, are you collaborating well?

Now let me tell you about the time when I let the team of multicultural developers and I remember very well that there had to be a lot of emphasis on excellent communication and for this I joined, at first we developed our own software project management tool , especially just to manage our projects, and then I also made sure that we were constantly communicating with the requirements and talking about everything going well for them, this was also especially important because my team was working for me remotely, so this It saved us a lot of headaches in the long run and I think that and this approach of prioritizing a great start was actually the key element in making this collaboration a great success because we worked together for about seven years.

Now invent and simplify has a very famous behavioral question, like many interviews, which tells me about a recent one. piece of innovation that you have done and this is how I would answer it within my own context here the most recent piece of innovation that I have done in recent years is with my youtube channel where I found an alternative method providing recruitment marketing services instead of just running job ads on transactional marketplaces and also the other alternative would have been running some TV ads where there's no measurement capability, there's no data-driven decision-making process, so this one turned out pretty well for I mean , it became a full-time business opportunity and my YouTube channel is even doubling month by month, but today I also provide coaching services.

Another possible question here would be to talk about the situation you found yourself in. a creative way to overcome a problem and this is how I would answer it now: Project manager at a b2b HR software service, at the time we experienced a healthy amount of growth and while this was good for the business, our foundation data showed signs of weakness here, so the obvious solution was of course to buy to invest in a distributed server system, however this was not financially viable for us at the time, so what I did there was invent a simple caching mechanism that would guarantee that the candidate reports will be general, they will be cached as files and then it will be much easier for the other base to handle all this heat and if this proves it works quite well for us because we managed have hundreds of thousands of people. within the same server as we had hundreds of thousands of people on the same server with the same database and the same software working together now the leaders are right.

Lottie is probably the most complicated of the 14 principles of inertia which basically means what it says Successful people are usually right most of the time and let me give you an example here. How would you answer the question of telling me when you assume the leadership role? So let me tell you about the time when I managed a team of around six technical developers for an HR software as a service if in the beginning if in the initial years the software earned very well and we acquired more and more clients than after a certain period of time we experienced a lack of growth and I really felt that it was the right time to step up and take leadership here and, together with my business partner, who was an HR professional and a technical person, really try to see what was happening and what could be done in this context.

It has to be said here, I myself was quite skeptical about the success of the project, however, after intense discussions and a thorough decision making process, we decided to implement another round of features that would be considered innovative in my other technical sign of my business. . partners and trying to improve sales and those were actually the most intense three months of my career in technical project management because everyone was feeling a little unmotivated and they were actually showing their lack of confidence in this project being successful, but fortunately For us, we managed to deliver those types of technical features in a very short time and within budget and this really proved to be one of the key elements in reviving the project and essentially having a profitable business, so if my previous example was geared towards my leadership.

In general, let me now tell you another example that is more oriented towards data-driven decision making, so what applicants throw is a technical project manager for a human resources software, the holy grail of the software was to promote the idea of that personality profiles would win. momentum within a digital context and we actually developed this idea for about two years, however the data told a completely different story at the time, we clearly noticed that it was becoming very much a candidate driven market for our industry and We also noticed that many candidates prefer to give us as little information as possible within the hiring process, which is how we really shifted to what I was always an adaptive system, i.e. structured hiring processes and data-driven decision making in general. , but this worked pretty well back then.

In our case, I mean, we had hundreds of thousands of people within our software, so learning and being curious is actually not very commonly used as a direct question in Amazon interviews that I know of, however, there are some unique opportunities for you to show this, for example, if If you receive a question like, for example, tell me about the time when you were dealing with conflict in your team, a possible answer is let me tell you about the time when you were a project manager , when I was leading a team of multicultural developers and it happened that a particularly talented developer was not happy with the way things were progressing for them and, in fact, had no idea about this.

I discovered it by mistake, not through my project leader there because apparently they weren't discussing this much, but due to the fact that I was always trying to communicate too much with my team, he was somewhat reluctant to make some changes to the software and didn't he was very communicative so I try to explore to dig a little deeper into the details and I saw what was going on and then he actually told me that he wasn't very happy because he wasn't the leader of the team because he was the most talented and he said He was a hard worker, so I led the meeting.

I contacted Lima, our team leader, and asked her what was going on and she told me that it's okay, this developer is very talented, but sometimes he is late for work and sometimes he also feels a little disconnected from reality, so I called a meeting between the three of us and again tried to listen as best I could to all parties and in fact I was given leadership to my team. In fact, I agreed with her that the developer was not particularly good in a leadership role and in fact, we tried that particularly talented developer for another project, we need a leadership position, a leadership role, however, he didn't really like it and luckily he stayed with us as a particularly talented developer for another five years and another option for showcasing. this learn and be curious, a beginning would be to answer questions like tell me about the time you missed a solution not only for a problem, so for this let me tell you the story of my youtube channel, if at the beginning there were not many people watching.

In my videos I always did my best to explore and do extensive testing on what might work best for me and I have done this in a sort of series, so first I used to talk to the camera whatever I wanted. I thought it was interesting, but it didn't work, then I started doing earlyleadership which, by the way, in the first video in that series, what were the 14 Amazon leadership principles, which immediately started to gain a lot of attention, however, it wasn't until I believed. A good six months later I realized that Amazon is a quirky company whose content is really interesting to people and it's the way to go here, so the main thing I wanted to highlight here is that it's this exploratory exploration. work that responded to the relative success of my YouTube channel.

I think the key to both of my successful YouTube channels today is always trying to explore more and more options to see what content people would actually want to consume, as well as hiring and developing the best people. He's probably not the most famous at Amazon for his leadership principles and may only be primarily sought after for HR roles. However, there are some things we could exemplify here, as a good question to show this kind of principle. Tell me about the time when you motivated the group of people, so let me tell you about the time when I led the multicultural developer team and like in any IT role, you know turnover is pretty high with these things, especially if your team is young.

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 show them that the work was meaningful to this project and of course , it happened to me that a team member wanted to leave and they were competing with competing businesses because we couldn't and he actually used the reason to get his salary increased because I don't know. I know 20 percent is the main reason to go to a competitor, but when I talked to them and this new God and essentially negotiated, but at the time I just discussed what was going on, it was another problem that was the root cause of this problem.

I didn't get along very well with that with the team leader, so I met with my team leader and between the three of us we decided on a new management strategy that would really work to empower the We had even more talent than then to empower our developers. within the team and fortunately this negotiation strategy worked quite well in this case and stayed with us for about two years. Now it's another possible example here regarding development contracting. It will be best to talk about the time when I was involved in outsourcing small IT jobs and one of the main factors for the success of this initiative is really hiring and developing the best people possible.

Now, of course, they are not the best in the world, but they are the best in your case and this is what matters the most and that is why I was not sure about maintaining a great relationship between these two parties and not only this. but as the business grew, I also made sure to hire people not necessarily to work on a certain project, but to see how they performed within a certain context and I always wanted to hire only the people who were good. connected with the latest trends and with the latest technologies and determined, where I delivered more than 50 such projects, now insists on the highest standards, it is also a fairly common leadership principle to show within your answers and now, how show how?

Show that you take these higher standards seriously. One way would be to show that you really collaborate well because this is very important, especially for teams at companies like Amazon who have so many teams, so this is how you would answer a question. Does it collaborate well taking this principle into account? So one of my clients is in the art gallery business and I manage his digital presence. While these things are not technically complex, the main challenge here is to always ensure that 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 is not uncommon If we receive an invitation to an exhibition from an artist that has a resolution that is too low or not, it is not unusual that we have to change.

Exhibition dates are made at short notice, so we all had to put systems in place to ensure that, for example, we had common calendars with the gallery owners, you know, to always be in sync with what was going on. This is happening because things can happen on short notice and also try to add a little bit more to add more time to ask the artists well in advance to provide us with a document so that everything can stay up to date, so fortunately, but this is going pretty well. Well, and the art, the owners of the art gallery have just opened the second gallery in the center.

Now another possible question that you can use to show this. Insisting on the highest standards here will be: We all do things we wish we could take back at some point. so tell me about the situation where you wish you would have handled the situation differently so let me tell you that Baltimore handled the multicultural developers issue specifically when I appointed the new team lead so while she was great Technically speaking, it was. she wasn't too communicative and as my team was working remotely for me I felt it was a pretty serious problem so I decided to coach her and started asking her how she would react to certain situations and I felt like she wasn't really paying too much attention to what she was saying, I felt like we weren't connecting, we weren't connecting very well, so I started trying to push a little harder to see how she would do in certain scenarios. and because our situation became quite tense, she actually started crying and I have since learned the lesson of reading a little about the other party's culture and how they are used to doing things before getting involved. in more tense situations, but fortunately she, she, we worked together during the seventh round for about seven years, so thinking big is another fairly common leadership principle that questions are asked about during Amazon interviews and one of those questions could be tell me about the The time you were, you faced a problem that had multiple solutions, so let me tell you about the world's damn technical project manager in a b2b HR software or just my business partner, after experimenting around After two years of constant growth, we felt that the software was the business was going a little in the wrong direction, so we analyzed the situation and realized that actually the development was going very well, our developers were delivering great quality, Our clients were also happy, so we had to look for other opportunities.

We had to find other options to grow our business and for that we applied a lot of qualitative and quantitative analysis here and in fact we decided to develop more innovative features and not only that, but we also decided that we could invest at the same time in implementing to introduce, add new sales efforts to add new customers using that set of innovative features as an argument in that case and yes, this turned out to be the winning solution in that situation and I think sales grew around 200 percent in the first two quarters of the next year and Another interesting question to test these great principles could be to tell you all the time where you had to choose between technologies for a project and for this let me tell you about the moment I was in.

Outsourcing client projects to my own developer teams it was always a challenge to choose which technology we would need to use for a project and the choice was often between PHP, the free version and dotnet, the Microsoft version and the decision of who came down to it. often to what type of project it was, in the sense that it was a short-term project where maybe I could use some components, in which case I would often choose the.net version because it had a lot of components ready to use in this sense or it was a longer term project that requires a lot of customization, in which case I usually went with the PHP version and by the way, there was also the office budget constraint to take into account, but I felt like this turned out pretty well because it only I believed that it was only necessary to change the technology for a project once before the project was completed because the essential part of all this was to meet our clients with the right kind of quality and timeliness, so the skewed fraction is also a Very common leadership principle at Amazon, but especially for entry-level roles, it often goes very well with ownership and for this, Dan Ashok is a pretty standard question.

He told me about the time when you sacrificed short-term goals for long-term success, which by the way is the definition of the principle of ownership, so probably the best example would be to talk about my last business decision that I made with my YouTube channel because At the beginning 2090 Nest Business started to grow quite well. I had to decide whether to invest in new tools or continue making my videos using my iPhone 7 and this was not an easy decision also due to some financial constraints. However, I decided that my main priority would be to have a more stable charging schedule in the long term and, if you think about it, investing in new tools wouldn't put me out of a job if this turned out to be a bad decision, so I decided to go ahead and therefore this.

I had to push back my upload schedule by I think two or three weeks, however it turned out to be a great no-loss investment, because as soon as I started posting videos with my new setup, not only were they easier to post. together and I have more time to invest in this scenario, but there are also more views on these videos, so in this case it turned out to be a successful solution and the second example to show this biased fraction principle would be with another question that I used Tell me about the time when you were 75% into the project but you had to change pivot strategies so let me tell you about them when I was a project manager for a b2b technical HR software where at one point we decided to integrate . as many job boards as possible, Windows software to allow our clients to post jobs on the Internet and there are many dozens of possible job boards;

However, as soon as we integrated the seven most popular ones that we knew, we immediately detected something very interesting. that everyone was posting jobs through just one of them, so we had to suddenly decide to change our strategy from integrating more job boards to integrating them better and integrating them better, so we decided to integrate that job board as well as good. To grow as much as possible, we became their premium partners after a short time and this sudden change of focus ensured that we got quite good momentum and it turned out that I think 90 to 95 percent of the jobs were posted on the position . just the board of directors, which, to be honest, we make very profitable for us, so frugality is a pretty important leadership principle: achieving more with less, and so I think the best possible question that would show this trait would be to tell me about the time when you were dealing with ambiguity, so let me tell you about the time when my good friends and clients, real estate investors, started their first art gallery, since I was the guy who knew about TI and they were real estate investors and together with an art critic, I tried to r

each

a successful compromise in this case, so they were dreaming big because the building they bought was big, the art gallery was also thinking about big because he saw it as an opportunity to add as much information as possible to the website.

They build their presence online and yet, for my part, I knew that there was no business plan for this in a digital context that would generate cash income in the short term, even in the medium term, so it was a process of quite intense negotiation. because I also knew that if we start with a big website then resources are invested and the website will run out quickly. It's actually not easy to create a huge website, so luckily in the end we came to some compromise to get started. relatively small and to add more content as the business evolved and fortunately this did not work out at all well because they have been my clients for four six years and they have just opened the second art gallery since then and the second example regarding frugality It would be to talk about my first job to make money, but that was about 15 years ago and then when the Internet was just starting, I used to bid and win a lot of small projects on the Internet that I would then outsource to my remote work teams. developers, but despite the fact that it was a cash-strapped environment because I probably couldn't have afforded to hire people full-time, they stand out as being quite valuable in the long run because if today you seeVirtually any large company has become a major outsourcing powerhouse, so an interesting question for the trust showcase would be to tell me about the time you received negative feedback from your manager and how you handle this.

I remember in a previous business we were fulfilling HR b2b software I was in charge of the technical part and my business partner was an HR veteran and I remember that every time we had to develop new prototypes of four functions to using the software, my business partner used to be very picky about content. it was specifically what text and where the buttons would be on that given screen and for this I always did my best to listen at first as best as I could and then not only that, but also give you a very early alpha, a very rough sketch. of this prototype where he would add his comments and then instead of showing him the beta, after he finished his video, I tried my best to add that little extra touch to really try to innovate a little bit in mind. and to be creative, I try to foresee, I try to predict what you would like to happen on those screens and this helped a lot to mitigate our various disagreements that sometimes, as normal, we think and our business continued for about six years, so yes my previous example was talking to a superior, now let me show Chris an example where I talked to my direct reports and I, within this context, gain trust, so in an earlier version, Rose, the project manager from the team of multicultural developers.

I always went above and beyond communicating the needs of the project and because it was a very challenging environment and we always had changes and various clients requested many different things and changed their minds a lot, sometimes it happened that we had misunderstandings. within our own team and people who just weren't happy with how things were going because sometimes things were too fluid, even if the team was young, so for this I wasn't sure we'd always employed diplomatic posturing here. I always listen I always tried not to rush decisions and basically also encouraged them to talk to each other because you know developers tend to be introverted and fortunately this worked quite well in this scenario we worked together for about seven years so the idea is another important leadership principle at Amazon and the first example will be simple.

I mean, the idea could also be used in a leadership context where you communicate effectively with everyone on your team to see what was a point, what went well and what didn't, so let me quickly show an example in 15 seconds. As a project manager of a 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, to ensure successful collaboration, I also tasked them with designing our own development software. project management and I made sure to communicate almost daily with each of them to basically over communicate and also be diplomatic within our relationship so of course you know it happened that we had challenges however our business relationship It lasted four and seven years.

For the second example here, I think this is the interesting example to give here because it applies to many types of engineering roles within Amazon and the most interesting question here is tell me when you use data to develop a strategy, so let me tell you about them when I was a project manager for a b2b HR software that I also designed and while designing the software I also made sure that I would design some reports that would give me a good level of analysis on what was working and what wasn't within the software and I remember very well what we once had in one of those instances.

We tracked the approval rate within each step of the hiring process that we had in the software and I remember that one of those key approval rate metrics for the first step called the personality profile was particularly low compared to the others, so that we had to look closer. In that step to see what was going on and fortunately we employed both this type of quantitative analysis through the report and also a qualitative analysis with my business partner who was an HR veteran and fortunately we decided to make the step optional, which in turn, allowed us to increase our approval rate, but I think three times immediately just from that analysis, you have a backbone at odds with the committees.

Another very, very interesting leadership principle is Amazon, especially for high-level positions and the main reason for this to happen. What happens is that many of the questions during the behavioral interview are such as: "We all have to deal with people who don't like us. Tell me all the time you had to deal with that person. How did you handle the situation?" ". I tell you about the time when I was in a business relationship with my partner for a b2b HR business and his values ​​were particularly more conservative than mine, so in the beginning I often made sure to listen carefully to what he had to say because It was also the language difference, so I thought it was very important for me to understand what he was talking about.

So also the key to developing our relationship was to act diplomatically at all times. Now, leaving this leadership component aside, I would always make sure to look. dig into the data and try to validate what he said with something real, some kind of metric and of course then present him with that data and it just so happened that he didn't agree with my rationale even if the data was telling a different story as well. that I just had to surrender what he was, suddenly it finally happened that he was right about these things too and our business relationship developed for about five years and this helped me a lot in understanding how to deal with other people whose values ​​are different than mine, so now another example here regarding probably the same type of questions at a time when they disagreed with someone, so at that time I, my good friends and clients, real estate investors started their first art gallery together with an art critic we had to decide the strategy for their online presence and you know, real estate investors tend to think big, so so do art critics because you know that's basically the way get things done, no matter how I am and in information technology I understand the challenges of developing a huge website with few resources and without any real business plan within a digital context, there was no idea of ​​​​monetizing this communication in a digital context. digital and even though I warned them that this was going to happen.

We actually went ahead and made a pretty decent website at first. I mean, we had six pages for each artist showing in the gallery, six pages on the website and this, however, over time we realized that they really realized that the situation was no longer like that. sustainable and today you only have one page for these artists, but to be clear, we are talking about a success story because they recently opened the second art gallery in the center, so the latest leadership principles give results either is least important. This is used widely, especially for high-level roles, so a particularly interesting behavioral question for this principle is tell me about a difficult goal you set and achieved, so let me tell you about a time when I was a project manager. during a confidential business for about 5 years, so if in the first 2 years the business was going very well, then the project started moving in the wrong direction and I really felt that the project was starting to be at a crossroads, so I called a meeting with my commercial side. and with the other stakeholders of the project and together we decided with a very narrow majority to implement a certain set of features and we gave ourselves the ground of three months to implement them and then we would see how this project would evolve, so I remember even today that this was the moment most challenging time I managed technical project in my career and I always had to motivate myself to remotely evade my team almost every day because they were also seeing what was going on and some clients were even leaving in the meantime and bread and butter day from my example is that communication in this case turned out to be a vital element in helping my team deliver what we promised we do and despite the fact that actually some of my own team members left during the project during those intense 3 months of development.

Fortunately we managed to meet the project specifications before the deadline. I remember that we finished a month early and with adequate quality, so it turned out to be a very very task. An important step in that business that fortunately started in the right direction and the second example here regarding this leadership principle of delivering results is not the answer to the question: do you collaborate well? So these are more on the leadership side of the stories. Here, let me tell you the story of when I let the team of multicultural developers task us with handling several client requests and since I knew it was going to be a longer project, because I hired them on a long-term basis, I first made sure that we designed software together with them just to manage our software development and I also used another trick here, which is because our internal connection did not allow video calls at that time, we used text messages through Skype and we used a 12, an advantage in the sense. that we tracked all communications and would use it to debug any misunderstandings and any issues that arose and this was actually one of the vital elements of the success of many other projects because our client was neither, us not giving ourselves the clearest specifications possible and often They changed their minds rightly, but by over-communicating and maintaining diplomacy within a team context, we managed to accomplish many projects this way and they actually worked for me for about seven years, so just a few final notes here.

Please note that throughout the video I only used a handful of

examples

and at the end of the video I think there was a lot of overlap which made the video a little boring to watch, so the same applies. for Amazon interviews and especially for us, the senior roles that made it all the way, so if you're on track, you're going to have four, five, six hours of continuous interviews and 50% of that is behavioral interviews, so I can Imagine this video wasn't even an hour long, so if you have to talk for hours about these behaviors, there will be overlap, so my point here is to prepare more stories, if you can, for your interview.

Aside from this, there are some pretty common sense tips, like don't use, we did this, but use, I did this and it will take you a little while to get used to these things, but as long as you're aware of them, I think you should be. Well, and also for failure stories, try to highlight the last part, the results, part of your star career or not, don't talk too much about failure and don't be negative, never end a story in a negative way. keep in mind because that's setting the wrong trigger for the follow up question because you just ended on a negative note your interview won't be your gift and say hey but you did this no, they want to see what went wrong there because their job is to identify weaknesses within your profile because behavioral interview theory is simply observing your past behavior now to predict your future behavior right now.

Other than that I think it's all common sense if you look here and of course you will get better once you practice these things, however I would always answer that I would keep these answers to less than 1, maybe 1/2 minute, again, This is also a matter of practice, so as always, I hope you found this information useful and thank you. Thanks so much for looking