This article is all about Amazon Leadership Principles for interviews.
But why do we need to understand and prepare these principles?
First and foremost, when you interview for Amazon, in either all the rounds or in some of the rounds there will be a lot of case studies or questions which need to be answered using the Amazon Leader Principle.
Secondly, once you understand these principles you will actually feel that you understand how good or bad you were at solving business problems, what mistakes did you do, and how you figured it out knowingly or unknowingly.
Amazon Leadership Principle helps you in understanding your work in a much better way.
Always be prepared with these principles, I will put out questions on these principles and you need to think through and answer these questions. These might seem to be very natural when you are practicing at home but when these questions are asked in an interview then you might end up blabbering 😛
Under no means, I would like to say that these are the only definitions and answers to the questions. I sincerely urge you to write your own answer in the STAR format, give it a shot and we will evaluate the answers 🙂
Amazon Leadership Principle Questions for interview
Amazon 14 Leadership Principles:-
- Customer Obsession
This world is customer centric, you make an app for customers, you provide services to customers, you do everything for you customer. If you are working in a client facing company then you client is your customer.
Give an example when you did not meet the expectation of your client. What did you do next? How did you react?
You can’t just go and say that you were perfect and did not commit any mistake. May be you will remember a blunder which you did in the last MBR, you stated that but you can’t answer ‘How did you mend that mistake’
My example – I once created an ML model but since it was a high priority task with time crunch so I missed an important variable thus went with half cooked model.
How I mended – Looked for more variables, did rigorous EDA and came up with far better results
This is STAR methodology
S – What was the Situation ? ML model with a time crunch
T – What was the Task at hand? Had to work on with limited resource to predict XYZ with ABC accuracy
A – What Action did you take? After I missed out on this opportunity, we did rigorous EDA and identified many good variables
R – What was the Result ? Very stable and robust model with better accuracy - Ownership
How good are you at taking ownership, are you a ‘minimum guy’ like Srikant 😛
Tell us one time when you take ownership of a task and completed it.
I once identified a problem which the client was facing to identify fraudulent behavior and then approached with a scalable solution - Invent and Simplify
How innovative are you?
Have you ever took up a complex problem and solved it with a fresh and simple approach?
Well, There was a situation when we were trying to build an application to check if two migrated reports are identical or not, we tried to build some pipeline but it was taking a lot of time. There was a freely available software which used to break PDF in screenshots and another application which can match two pictures. Build a simple program to automate these two processes. Simple solution - Are Right, A lot
Leaders have a good judgment and they are mostly right.
In your previous role did you ever face an issue which you solved using your judgement or past experience?
There was a time when my colleague were trying to build a time series model but they were unable to figure out the reason for low accuracy. I asked them to do EDA and figure out some variables which might be a reason for the dip and hiccups. Then I suggested to use a model like ARIMAX which can take both time series and Regression !! - Learn and Be Curious
Are you curious enough to bring more ideas to the table?
Tell me an instance when you asked a lot of questions to the data to finally figure out the root cause of an issue. - Hire and Develop the Best
Do you hire the best or do you hire and develop the best?
Tell me one instance when you realize that a person in your team is not the best fit for the role. What did you do?
I once had a person to whom I was giving KT in my last organization, he was not able to grasp some concepts. What I did? I made extensive documentation and videos of the complete process of KT, advised him a couple of courses on internet. The output – He was able to pick up things very quickly and was able to deliver everything at a much better speed. - Insist on the Highest Standard
Do you believe in having high standard delivery of task?
Tell me one instance when you insisted on quality of the deliverable and created an impact despite being late on the task.
No Sir, I am always prepared, I always provide best solution 😛 - Think Big
Tell me one instance when you thought of a big opportunity, pressed for it and delivered something beautifully
I once had the courage to talk the client of a BIG MNC about the fault in their web home page. There was an issue of cannibalization of lower pages. I worked individually on the project to justify the issue and presented with a different design - Bias For Action
Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.
When was the last time you had to take up a decision with limited time or resource. What actions did you take? - Frugality
Tell me one time when you tried something out of your own personal time and solved a very small but regular problem.
In my last organization people used to misplace their Key fobs once they were in their notice period. So, i created a simple tracking Excel sheet which resulted in less number of Key fobs misplacement - Earn Trust
Tell me the last time you earned trust with your last client. Why was there a trust issue and how did you resolve?
There was some trust issue with the Client, they were not sure of our analytical capabilities and we were monitored by their Analytics consultant. We took this as an opportunity, did cross team sessions and hands-on exercises to build capability - Dive Deep
One time when you actually dig deep into the issue to find out solution to an important issue
Talk about EDA in any project - Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Have you ever said NO to a project or work and delivered something of a superior quality?
I was once working on one of the important queries, legacy query, though there were some issues but it was there for a while or something. I showed up, fixed that in a month - Deliver Results
What is the most difficult situation you ever faced in your life? How did you deal with it?
Created a dashboard where a client can plug and play around the UI so that we can conclude on the design of the dashboard. Thus saved a lot of time for the team
There are some good questions here as well – Link
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