Amazon Product Manager Interview Guide
Preparing for FAANG product management interviews can seem like a challenging task at first. Especially if you are interviewing for a company like Amazon, you need to be at the top of your game regarding technical competency and knowledge about Amazon’s leadership principles. Resume reviews and LinkedIn makeovers can help you land that golden opportunity of interviewing for Amazon. Still, this interview guide will walk you through everything you need to know as you prepare for your dream offer as an Amazon Product Manager! 🙌
This Amazon Product Manager interview guide covers the following topics:
What does an Amazon Product Manager do?
Interview Process and Timeline
Amazon Product Manager Interview Questions
How To Prepare For The Interview
Conclusion
What does an Amazon Product Manager do? 🤔
Product Managers at Amazon play a crucial role in the company, given the number of products and services Amazon offers. They work closely with Technical Product Managers (TPM), Senior Product Managers, different teams like marketing, engineering, design, etc., and various stakeholders involved in the process.
An Amazon Product Manager’s day involves:
- Meetings with team members/managers/stakeholders
- Conducting market research to understand their consumer needs
- Communicating with internal and external stakeholders
- Leading a product from idea to execution
- Improving features in existing products to ensure they meet customer expectations
Entry-level Product Managers at Amazon in the United States have a total compensation package of around $173k annually. [Source: levels.fyi]
Revelant Resource: How To Crack FAANG Product Manager Interviews
Interview Process and Timeline ⏳
Recruiter Screen (30 minutes)
The recruiter screen for the Amazon Product Manager interview process will be similar to any other round at other FAANG+ companies. This 30-minute call will assess your cultural fit for the organization and your ability to succeed in the role. The recruiter will also provide you with an overview of the interview process.
If you have questions about the role or interview process, this would be the right time to ask them. Many FAANG+ companies also provide candidates with a lot of interview support and prep material to set them up for success. If your Amazon Recruiter hasn’t mentioned anything about this to you already, you can check with them about that on this call.
In terms of interview preparation, your main goal for this screen should be to leave a positive impression on the recruiter and demonstrate indirectly through your conversations how you understand the role, company culture, and Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) well.
Manager/Team Screen (45 minutes)
The Manager/Team Screen will be a 45-minute video call with your manager or fellow Amazon Product Managers. In this round, you will mainly be assessed for your domain expertise, technical capabilities, and understanding of the Amazon LPs.
Although Amazon PM interviews are technically complex, one topic that you will be repeatedly tested on will be the Amazon Leadership Principles. If you encounter PM-role-specific behavioral questions, avoid answering them as technical questions. Instead, try and demonstrate one of the LPs through the answer to show that you understand how the company works.
Onsite Interviews (4–6 rounds, 45 minutes each)
Depending on where you are currently located, these interviews could be onsite for you (where you’ll spend a day at one of the Amazon offices and interview with managers, team members, and product managers from the company back-to-back) or virtually, if the COVID-19 restrictions in your region haven’t eased yet.
The onsite interviews will be more or less similar to the manager screen. However, there will be a little more emphasis on your technical expertise and product management skills through the different rounds. During these interviews, you may also have a bar raiser present (Bar Raisers at Amazon are interviewers who may/may not belong to your team but assess you for the cultural fit within the company).
Amazon Product Manager Interview Questions 📝
Here are some Amazon Product Manager Interview Questions you could practice to prep yourself for the process.
Product Design Questions
- For a retail store, users frequently complain about long queues during checkout. What strategy would you use to improve the experience in the short and long term?
- Explain some new Alexa Skillsets you would roll out and why.
- How would you design a feature to reduce Amazon’s order return rate?
- Design a product to improve the lunch experience in XYZ company.
- How would you design Alexa for blind people?
- How would you design a test to measure the success of using a gift card promotion to get Prime members to download the Prime mobile app?
- How would you design a “Pay Later” feature for the Amazon app?
- Design an AWS service to help customers digitize their paper receipts.
- Evaluate an app design using these five design principles: Innovative, Understandable, Aesthetic, Honest, and Useful.
- Add food ordering capability to Amazon Echo. How would you go about designing the product?
Product Strategy Questions
- Should Amazon offer “Amazon Prime Lite”, which offers just a few perks of Amazon Prime at a fraction of the cost? If the answer is yes, what would you include in Prime Lite, and how much should it cost?
- Amazon Prime is considering launching a variant of its video streaming service for senior citizens (60+yrs). What parameters will you study to understand whether launching their product for this segment will be successful? How will you conclude whether it will be a success?
- Tell me about an Amazon product marketing strategy.
- A new product video review feature that increases sales can be rolled out now with a 2-hour video processing turnaround or six months later with instant processing using Machine Learning. Would you roll it out now or later?
- You are the new PM on the Alexa team. You are asked to develop a Product Strategy for the next few years. What would you do?
- How do you price a new tier for Amazon S3?
- You are the product manager for Amazon Quality and Logistics team and want to reduce customer returns. What would be your process, and what would you build?
- Would you consider Amazon and Intuit to be competitors?
- Amazon plans to expand its operations to Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. They have observed that users don’t trust the brand. What should they do to build trust with the user base?
- Should Amazon cut its affiliate rates?
Product Estimation and Metrics Questions
- How many reviews are left on Amazon on a given Monday?
- You are a product delivery manager at Amazon. Estimate how many face masks Amazon needs to stock in UK stores during the COVID-19 lockdown period.
- How would you estimate purchase order abuse on Amazon? How would you solve it?
- How would you estimate the number of new users Amazon gets in a day?
- How much time is spent waiting per day for an actual human in the Automated Systems in the US?
- You have a grocery delivery service that delivers food within 24 hours. How many trucks would you need to operate it?
- Pick a feature from a product of your choice & tell us how you will assess the success of that feature. Assume it is being launched now.
- Imagine that you realize a 20% drop in the checkout funnel in your daily routine of checking the conversion funnel. What would you do?
- You are the PM for Amazon’s cart page. How would you build a dashboard to measure success?
- How would you change the Amazon Fresh experience, and how would you measure them?
Technical Questions
- How would you design a feature to allow Amazon shoppers to upload videos for product reviews?
- How would you design a system that allocates package delivery orders to drivers and maximizes fulfillment during busy and non-busy hours?
- Amazon is developing a machine learning algorithm to better target shoppers who have saved items in their shopping carts. The algorithm will email users to remind them about their shopping carts. What factors would you consider when designing this algorithm? What variables would you tweak to yield higher shopping cart purchase rates?
- How will you improve ad monetization for streaming services apps?
- How will you design an algorithm for the “continue watching segment” for a streaming services platform?
Behavioral Questions
Amazon behavioral interviews are mainly focused around their Leadership Principles. Behavioral interviews for the PM role may either be a separate round, or included as a few questions in every interview. You can learn more about these leadership principles here.
- Customer Obsession — How would you make something significantly simpler for a customer?
- Ownership — Give me two examples of when you did more than what was required.
- Invent and Simplify — Tell me about a time when you worked on a project and realized there was more potential in it than you initially thought.
- Are Right, A Lot — Tell me about a time when you didn’t have enough data to make the right decision. What did you do? What path did you take? Did the decision turn out to be the correct one?
- Learn and Be Curious — Tell me a time when you designed a product feature that didn’t go well. And how did you overcome that situation?
- Hire And Develop The Best — Tell me a situation where you went out of your comfort zone to learn and deliver something.
- Insist on the Highest Standards — Tell me about your most significant accomplishment. Why was it significant?
- Think Big — Tell me about a time you came up with a not-so-obvious solution that led to a larger impact on the results of your task.
- Bias For Action — Have you ever dealt with a situation where speed was more important in deciding than thought? How did you navigate through it?
- Frugality — Tell me about a time when you worked on a critical project under a tight deadline. What did you sacrifice to achieve it? How did you overcome challenges? What were the short-term and long-term impacts of this project?
- Earn Trust — Tell me about a time when you received harsh feedback. How did you react?
- Dive Deep — Describe a time you had significant issues with your product close to a release.
- Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit — Tell me about a time when you challenged the status quo. How did you manage to change? What challenges did you face while changing? What were the outcomes? What would you have done better?
- Deliver Results — Give me an example of a time when you were 75% through a project and had to pivot the strategy — how were you able to make that into a success story?
- Strive to be the Earth’s Best Employer — What is the vision of your product for the next five years?
- Success and Scale Bring Responsibility — Why is Amazon Prime popular, and what is the outcome of using it?
To learn about these leadership principles in detail, read our Amazon Behavioral Interview Questions Guide.
How To Prepare For The Amazon Product Manager Interview? ⚡️
Amazon interview rounds are challenging — both technically and behaviorally. Here are a few tips to ace your interviews:
- Be very well-versed with the Amazon Leadership Principles. Candidates are tested on their knowledge of these principles in every hiring process step. Keep at least two or three events from past experiences in mind to talk about for each of the leadership principles.
- Using the STAR method is the best way to answer Amazon interview questions. Lay the foundation for your answer by describing the situation and task, followed by the actions you took and the results they yielded.
- Amazon interviews can be technically heavy. Especially for PM roles, you might come across questions that you may not necessarily be able to finish solving within the given time. In such a case, the interviewers mainly assess your approach to arriving at the answer and your thought process. Make sure your share your thoughts with them as you answer the questions.
- Keep the customer at the center of all your solutions. Amazon is a customer-centric company. This means meeting the needs of its customers is the top priority.
Conclusion 🚀
Amazon is one of the FAANG companies that also sponsors H-1B visas for international candidates in the U.S. Besides the stellar compensation and perks, Amazon is a great company to kickstart your product management journey. If you need help with mock interviews, connect with our 100+ team of FAANG+ mentors and let them help you ace your next Amazon interview.
