Amazon interview preparation: stories for all 16 Leadership Principles

Make it yours: Compare the two. The stronger version has a person in it, a reason for each step, a number and a lesson. Check your own stories for the same four things.

1. Situation

   Our payment dashboard showed 99.4% success, yet support kept hearing from mobile customers whose payments had failed.

2. Task

   I owned the payments service on call, and I wanted to find out which picture was true.

3. Action

   I compared 200 support tickets against our request logs and found that the dashboard missed sessions where the app timed out before reaching us. I added client-side timeout events to the metric, which put true mobile success at 96.8%. Most failures traced back to a three-second client timeout, which was shorter than our slowest bank’s response time. I raised it, added a clear “still processing” state and tested both on slow networks.

4. Result

   Mobile payment success reached 99.1% within four weeks, payment contacts fell by about a third and the corrected metric became our launch check. I now compare dashboards against raw customer reports before I trust them.

Make it yours: Use any story where the first number you saw turned out to be wrong. Know your sample size and how you reached your conclusion.

1. Situation

   Only 41% of new small sellers finished setting up their store, and sales wanted more features to win them over.

2. Task

   I owned activation for this segment and needed to decide what to build next.

3. Action

   I sat in on 20 onboarding calls and analyzed where sellers dropped off. Most were stuck on tax and shipping forms they couldn’t complete on day one. I wrote a one-page proposal to move those steps until a seller’s first order, reducing setup from eleven steps to five, and I made the case to legal and finance by showing nothing required was being dropped.

4. Result

   Activation rose to 58% in two quarters with no new features, and first-order rates rose with it. The team adopted the rule that any new setup step needs customer evidence behind it.

Make it yours: Bring a story where customer evidence changed the plan. Show who you had to convince and how you did it.

1. Situation

   Mislabeled pallets were reaching outbound about 40 times a week, and each shift blamed the other.

2. Task

   I ran the day shift, but the fix needed both shifts, so I took on the whole problem.

3. Action

   I spent a week on the floor at changeover and tracked each error to its source. Most came from pallets moved mid-count with no clear owner. With the night shift lead, I built a one-page handoff checklist and had associates help test it, then changed the rule so that nothing moved without a signed count. Some leads worried it would slow us down, so I reviewed rates with them daily for the first two weeks.

4. Result

   Mislabeled pallets fell to about six a week within a month, and rates held steady. The other building adopted the checklist, and I still audit it monthly.

Make it yours: Pick a recurring problem you solved at its source. Show what you changed in the system, as well as what you did that week.

1. Situation

   During my internship on a marketplace team, a vendor manager asked why returns from one category had risen, but no analyst had time to look.

2. Task

   My assigned project was something else, but I offered to find out in my own time if someone could point me to the data.

3. Action

   I hadn’t used SQL beyond a class, so I worked through our data documentation and asked an analyst to check my first queries. The analyst caught a double-counting error, which taught me to validate totals against a known report. I then broke returns down by vendor and reason and found that one product’s size chart caused most of the increase.

4. Result

   My manager shared the analysis with the regional team, the vendor corrected the chart and returns for that product dropped by about a fifth over the next two months. I documented my queries so analysts could rerun them.

Make it yours: Small scope is fine. Show curiosity, what you did by yourself and where you asked for help.

1. Situation

   I was leading a database migration for our customer accounts service, with a deadline tied to a vendor contract ending.

2. Task

   I owned the plan and the production run.

3. Action

   To save a day, I skipped the rehearsal on production-sized data. During the run, the migration locked a table for 40 minutes and about 1,200 customers saw errors. I stopped it, rolled back and told my manager and support within ten minutes, saying plainly that skipping the rehearsal had been my call. I contacted the vendor about a short extension, then ran a full rehearsal that exposed the locking problem and rewrote the job to run in small batches.

4. Result

   The second run finished with no customer impact, three days past our target but within the extended contract. I wrote the review with my own decision as the root cause and added a required rehearsal step for every migration. The team’s next three migrations ran without incident.

Make it yours: Pick a failure that genuinely mattered and was genuinely yours. Say exactly what you did wrong before you say what you fixed.

1. Situation

   We were launching a new checkout in six markets ahead of the holiday season.

2. Task

   As product manager, I had to recommend a rollout plan.

3. Action

   I recommended starting with two markets, because our payment testing in the others was thin. My director preferred launching everywhere to catch peak sales. I shared my data, the failures we might see and a compromise, and we talked it through. My director heard me out and chose all six, because missing peak would cost more than a contained failure. I told my team that this was now our plan and that I was behind it. Then I put my energy into making it work, building a market-by-market rollback plan and staffing a launch-day review.

4. Result

   We launched on time and caught peak. One market hit a local payment gap and rolled back for two days using that plan, then recovered. Looking back, I was right about the risk and my director was right about the cost of waiting.

Make it yours: Choose a story where you lost the argument and still helped the outcome. Stories that end with “and I was proved right” tend to miss the commit half.

1. Situation

   A partner launch date was fixed by a contract, and two weeks out our new pricing service still had gaps in its test coverage.

2. Task

   I led the work and had to decide whether to ask for a delay.

3. Action

   I split the work by what could be undone. The pricing logic could sit behind a flag and be switched off instantly, but one database change couldn’t be reversed, so I left it out by designing around it for now. I proposed launching to the partner’s traffic only at 5%, with automated alerts and a person watching the first three days. I wrote down the remaining test gaps with a date to close them and shared that with my manager and the partner team.

4. Result

   We met the date. The 5% rollout caught two pricing bugs before most customers could see them, and we reached full traffic two weeks later. We closed the test gaps and shipped the database change the following month.

Make it yours: Use Amazon’s own distinction: many decisions are reversible and don’t need extensive study. Show that you knew which of yours were and which weren’t.

Make it yours: Replace the compliments with three true things: what you like doing, why this team and what you want to learn here.