亚麻BQ

Leadership Principles

1. Customer Obsession

Leaders start with the customer and work backward. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

• Who was your most difficult customer?

• Give me an example of a time when you did not meet a client’s expectation. What happened, and how did you attempt to rectify the situation?

• When you’re working with a large number of customers, it’s tricky to deliver excellent service to them all. How do you go about prioritizing your customers’ needs?

• Tell the story of the last time you had to apologize to someone.

2. Ownership

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.

• Tell me about a time when you had to leave a task unfinished.

• Tell me about a time when you had to work on a project with unclear responsibilities.

3. Invent and Simplify

Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here”. As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.

• Tell me about a time when you gave a simple solution to a complex problem.

• Tell me about a time when you invented something.

4. Are Right, A Lot

Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.

• Tell me about a time when you were wrong.

• Tell me about a time when you had to work with incomplete data or information.

5. Learn and Be Curious

Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.

• Tell me about a time when you influenced a change by only asking questions.

• Tell me about a time when you solved a problem through just superior knowledge or observation.

-6. Hire and Develop The Best

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent and will move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.

• Tell me about a time when you mentored someone.

• Tell me about a time when you made a wrong hire. When did you figure it out and what did you do?

7. Insist on the Highest Standards

Leaders have relentlessly high standards – many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

• Tell me about a time when you couldn’t meet your own expectations on a project.

• Tell me about a time when a team member didn’t meet your expectations on a project.

8. Think Big

Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.

• Tell me about your proudest professional achievement.

• Tell me about a time when you went way beyond the scope of the project and delivered.

9. Bias for Action

Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.

• Describe a time when you saw some problem and took the initiative to correct it rather than waiting for someone else to do it.

• Tell me about a time when you took a calculated risk.

• Tell me about a time you needed to get information from someone who wasn’t very responsive. What did you do?

-10. Frugality

Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

• Tell me about a time when you had to work with limited time or resources.

11. Earn Trust

Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odour smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

• What would you do if you found out that your closest friend at work was stealing?

• Tell me about a time when you had to tell someone a harsh truth.

12. Dive Deep

Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.

• Give me two examples of when you did more than what was required in any job experience.

• Tell me about something that you learnt recently in your role.

13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

• Tell me about a time when you did not accept the status quo.

• Tell me about an unpopular decision of yours.

• Tell me about a time when you had to step up and disagree with a team members approach.

• If your direct manager was instructing you to do something you disagreed with, how would you handle it?

14. Deliver Results

Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

• By providing an example, tell me when you have had to handle a variety of assignments. Describe the results.

• What is the most difficult situation you have ever faced in your life? How did you handle it?

• Give me an example of a time when you were 75% of the way through a project, and you had to pivot strategy–how were you able to make that into a success story?

How to excel during an Amazon interview

1. STAR

Know Amazon’s Leadership Principles (See attachment) and know how to respond to these questions using the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, and Result).

Example question:

“Tell me about a time when you executed a solution with minimal/limited data.”

Situation: Describe the problem or challenge you encountered.

For example: We had a financial application that handled financial transactions for the organization that processed payments and returns for us. The technology stack we were using was java for our server side application, Spring MVC, Oracle backend and RESTful Services . Calls into corporate informed us that it was not able to be accessed by our offices nationwide.

Task: What was the task at hand or the solution you came up with to engage the situation.

We had to investigate what was causing this problem by working with our development team, systems engineers and networking team to isolate the issue.

Action: How did you execute? Did you get others involved, execute alone?

In working with the other teams, we focused on ruling out basic assumptions first such as physical and network connection issues with our networking team, then we focused on development team and found that the latest release that we had deployed had been tested for functionality but there was no regression testing that had taken place due to time constraints on the release date. This particular error led to a new release in our software that failed to run properly. We were able to simulate our last release in a virtualized environment and utilized both manual regression testing and automated testing framework called mokito to isolate the bug and fix it. The overall time it took to address this issue was 3 hours.

Result: What was the overall outcome and how did it impact the business/client?

The end result was not only that we could get the company application back online and resume financial transactions, but that we were able to put in documentation in place, and create a system to where all new code is loaded into our virtualized environment and performs end to end (load/regression/integration) testing before new functionality/enhancements are released. In doing so, I was able to move our org to a test driven development environment that has decreased downtime by ___%

The questions will not be proposed such as “Tell me when you displayed customer obsession.”, but rather phrased in a way that will target that specific principle. You may hear something such as “Tell me about a time when you simplified a process to cater to a client.” Now this one may cover 2 principles, such as “invent and simplify” and/or “customer obsession”. In this scenario, I would be sure to cover both bases to be on the safe side.

2. Ask clarifying questions.

Some of our questions are vague by design. Whether it is an OOP Design question, or binary tree question, we want to know how methodical you are. Are you able to define use cases and clarify requirements before you start to execute on a solution.

Example of a good response:

Question: Can you tell me how a binary tree works?

Sure. Binary trees are typically used to define a labeling function on a node, which associates a value to each node. They are used implement binary search trees and binary heaps and are used for efficient searching and sorting.

A better response would be:

Question: Can you tell me how a binary tree works?

Clarifying response: A binary tree, or a binary search tree? Is the tree balanced or unbalanced?

3. Be prepared

Don’t miss the opportunity to brush up on some things. Feel free to do a self-analysis (aka SWOT analysis) to understand what could de-rail your interview, and what you could do to prevent that. What are your strengths, and how can you best highlight those? What are your weaknesses and how can you brush up on those areas? Preparation is key in your success in moving forward with us.

At the end of the interview, which may be 5-10 minutes left, the interviewer will ask if you have any questions. Make sure you research who you will be speaking with and prepare questions that are tailored to them.

4. Learning comes from failure

Chances are you will be asked about a project or process that did not turn out right, or something that you did wrong and how it affected your team/business/client. This can be very uncomfortable for most people, as this topic can expose flaws. However, even Jeff Bezos has admitted to spending billions on failures (http://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-profits-failure-succession-big-bets-2014-12 ) The most important thing is what did you learn, how did you grow, and how did it make you into a better professional today? Don’t hesitate. Take the question head on with a smile and let them know that you are better today for it.

Reference

What questions to expect in an Amazon Interview? Here’s what the 14 Amazon Leadership Principles tell us.