Countless people have asked me over the years how to prepare for an Amazon interview and I always guide them to focus first and foremost on studying and understanding Amazon’s Leadership Principles (LPs). This sounds corny or perhaps misleading because, at most companies, a list of corporate values or principles is meaningless PR propaganda. They sound good, but they don’t really mean anything.
Amazon is not like other companies in this regard. Their 16 LPs are knit into every decision and every process– beginning with the hiring process. The criteria for who to hire and not hire is based on an evaluation of where each candidate (you) exceeds, meets, or falls short on each Leadership Principle.
Unlike a test like the ACT where you could be asked to solve an endless variety of problems, the Amazon interview test is limited to 16 topics. To prepare, spend time thinking about the kinds of questions you would ask if you were trying to elicit examples of work related to each principle. The more time you spend studying the principles and thinking about how these would be put into practice, plus examples from your career where you have done so, the better prepared you will be.
Heading: Name the product in a way the reader (i.e. your target customers) will understand. One sentence under the title.
Subheading: Describe the customer for the product and what benefits they will gain from using it. One sentence only underneath the Heading.
Summary Paragraph: Start with the city, media outlet, and your proposed launch date. Give a summary of the product and the benefit.
Problem Paragraph: This is where you describe the problem that your product is designed to solve. Make sure that you write this paragraph from the customer’s point of view.
Solution Paragraph(s): Describe your product in some detail and how it simply and easily solves the customer’s problem. For more complex products, you may need more than one paragraph.
Quotes & Getting Started: Add one quote from you or your company’s spokesperson and a second quote from a hypothetical customer in which they describe the benefit they are getting from using your new product. Describe how easy it is to get started, and provide a link to your website where customers can get more information and get started.
Q: What is the price?
Q: How do I get it?
Q: How does it work? (You are likely to have multiple versions of this question that cover different aspects of the customer experience.)
Q: How large is the estimated consumer demand for Melinda? What is the TAM (total addressable market?
The component parts to answering this include:
Q: What happens if a customer encounters x? How does the product deal with use case x? (there are likely to be several such questions).
Q: What are the challenging product engineering problems we will need to solve?
Q: What are the challenging customer UI problems we will need to solve?
Q: How will we manage the risk of the upfront investment required?
Q: Do we have any third-party dependencies to build this product? If so, what are they and why will they be willing to partner with us (what is in it for them)?
Q: What third-party technologies are we dependent on to function properly for x to work as promised?
Q: Are there any potential regulatory or legal issues to consider?
Q: What are the per-unit economics of the product? That is, what is our expected Gross Profit and Contribution profit per unit?
Q: What is the rationale for the price point you have chosen for the product?
Q: How much will we have to invest up front to build this product in terms of people, technology, inventory, warehouse space, etc.?
Q: What/who are the current competitors for this product?
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