The comprehensive Amazon Product Manager Interview Guide

The Amazon Product Manager interview process typically runs in this order:

• Online assessment (some loops, before any call)
• Recruiter call
• Phone screen 
• Writing assessment
• Onsite loop of 5 interviews, including:
  Product management craft and stakeholder interviews
  A technical depth interview (PM-T loops only)
  The Bar Raiser interview
• Debrief and decision

Before we get into the round-by-round description, you should know that Amazon structures its entire operational culture around its 16 core Leadership Principles (LPs). Each interviewer/ round in the loop will be explicitly assigned to evaluate about 2-3 of these.

Some applicants are asked to fill out an online assessment that can be of 2 types:

• Work-style assessment: Takes 10-20 minutes and asks you to choose statements that best describe your workstyle. These questions are strongly anchored to the LPs so the culture screen starts this early in the loop. 
• Work sample simulation: a mini trial by fire that takes 30-60 minutes that features practical tasks like reading charts or making LP-driven decisions.

You don’t really need to prepare in advance for this but you have to be sure to submit it before the deadline passes.

This is a 30-45 minute phone/video conversation with a recruiter or sometimes with the HM. Amazon clarifies that this is a formal interview that’ll screen and understand your basic qualifications and technical background. You might face a couple of behavioral questions that are tied to the LPs. At the end, you’ll have time for your own questions about the role/ team. 

Prepare to answer questions like:

• Tell me about yourself. Why are you applying to Amazon? 
• What are you currently working on day-to-day? 
• What kind of compensation are you expecting?

From this point on, the recruiter is your main POC so you should take the time to clarify which subjects/ skills your interviews will focus on, especially if you’re interviewing to be a PM-T.

Prepare a short answer to “tell me about yourself” that’s built around a highlight of your current role and has a segue into the opportunities at Amazon that excite you. 

This is a 60-minute call with the Hiring Manager or another senior leader and they’re positioned as the gatekeeper to the onsite interviews. The time splits evenly between LP-focused questions and functional questions about your product management experience. For PM-T roles, you’ll cover the technical product lifecycle. 

For the functional half of the screen, you’ll cover:

• Your experience with the product development process and the methods you've used
• How you stay informed about your industry and competitors
• How you express a product vision
• How you solve complex problems (you could get a small product insight/design/strategy case to test this)
• How you collaborate with cross-functional teams
• How you show leadership and inspire and align stakeholders

For the LP half, Amazon's guide asks you to:

• Know the LPs and prepare a few examples that align with them from recent projects and team interactions
• Show the data and analytics behind your decisions
• Show how your decisions or projects affected customers and stakeholders

Prepfully candidates have reported facing the following questions:

• What has been your biggest project so far? How did it impact the overall business?
• Tell me about a launch that didn’t deliver what you expected. How did you find out, and what did you do next?
• Have you ever had to cut or delay something you’d committed to because of a technical limitation? How did you handle it with the customer? (PM-T)

Candidates with borderline performance in this round report a second phone screen being scheduled. 

After a successful phone screen, the recruiter will send you the writing assessment which the interviewers later in the loop might bring up to discuss. 

You may be asked to write about either of these: 

• The most innovative project you’ve worked on
• A time you simplified the lives of customers

Some candidates were given more choices to pick from and were later asked to elaborate why they passed on the others during their onsite loop.

Our coaches advise going with the project or anecdote that’s richer or more layered so you have something solid to write about. Doc-wise, they made sure to give 4 pointers:  

• Communicate clearly without inundating the doc with jargon or buzzwords
• Be thorough with your thought process.
• Show how you use data to make decisions. Keep the customer front and center and quantify your impact
• Write about your personal contribution and how that raised the quality of the overall project 

Most Amazon PM onsite loops have 5 rounds which run for 55 minutes each. The rounds are:

• Product management craft and stakeholder interviews (testing across multiple rounds)
• Technical depth interview (PM-T loops, at least one, often domain specific)
• Bar Raiser Interview

The craft rounds are going to focus on traditional Product craft areas: insight and design, strategy, analytics, building/iterating/experimenting, and so on.

Each interviewer that you'll meet in your loop will be explicitly assigned to evaluate about two or three of the Leadership Principles using a targeted STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) format probing.

To have an anecdote for each question that’s posed, we suggest that you build a story bank of 8-10 stories. To have an edge over other candidates, we also recommend that you take the classic STAR framework and build it out into STAR+ (Situation, Task, Action, Result + the X-Factor: Learning) to structure your stories. When each story in your story bank ends with a personal takeaway, you’ll demonstrate intellectual humility that implicitly links to the LPs you’ll be evaluated on.

For PM candidates, the most heavily probed LPs are Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Dive Deep, and Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. 

To understand the line of questioning and the recommended approach you should take as a promising candidate, please read our article: Preparing for Amazon’s behavioral interview. 

These interviews are the heart of the loop and test your product and stakeholder work through LP-focused questions with follow-ups.

The Product Management portion primarily covers your ability to build and scale good products. Some aspects that frequently come up within this:

• End-to-end product ownership: from ideation/discovery through to build, launch, iteration, and scaling
• Your understanding of the competition and current market trends
• Product vision and strategy; and how you prioritize and solve product problems. This almost always gets tested through product cases; albeit not with the same format rigidity and depth that companies like Meta or Google get into
• Challenges from previous roles and how you overcame them
• Your user-centric approach, especially how you farm for feedback and utilize it in product decisions
• How you use data to make product decisions, and the tools and analytics you're proficient with
• Times you stepped up and took the lead even when you didn’t have direct authority 
• How you've rallied the troops and earned buy-in from stakeholders to align with your product vision/ plan

The Stakeholder Management competency officially covers: 

• How you communicate complex ideas to different stakeholders; and how you partner with peers across functions like engineering, design, marketing, and sales
• Working with business partners to understand their challenges and arrive at practical solutions
• Driving consensus amongst a diverse group of stakeholders regarding objectives or product vision 
• Negotiating and hashing out trade-offs with internal or external teams 
• Building a network of trusted peers who share your goals with examples of how you’ve all lent a helping hand to each other 
• Articulating collabs in a win-win manner so everyone walks away happy 

Prepfully candidates who recently appeared for these rounds reported the following questions:

• Walk me through how you diagnosed an underperforming product.
• Create a 3-year strategy for Amazon Prime Video.
• What do you do when you inherit a product with an unclear vision and poor documentation?
• How would you improve Amazon’s 3rd party marketplace ecosystem?
• Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer. 
• How are you using AI day-to-day at work? Have you integrated it into product development? 

Right at the top, we mentioned the sheer number of coaches, across every level of seniority, that we consulted to put this guide together. This is where you'll see the bulk of that input. We pooled their advice into the top 7 tips we'd give any Amazon PM candidate whose interview is approaching.

• Work backwards from the customer in every story, even when the story has nothing to do with Customer Obsession. Lead with the product you owned and who it was being built for. Then, name the pain point and how you got wind of it (discovery, user research, support tickets, the data, whatever it may be). Until interviewers know which specific customer problem you were solving, the strategic importance of your work won’t land.
• It’s hyper important to cover why solving this problem mattered to you and the customer. Explain why solving this problem took precedence too. Then, in this order, touch upon: final method and discarded options -> what you personally drove -> how you aligned stakeholders -> customer metrics and business results.
• If your story is about an internal tool, talk about the external customers and business that implicitly depended on it. 
• Anchor a multi-layered problem on its hardest layer. Leading with something that can be fixed in a day, like an unclear UI message, undermines your effort and the overall complexity.  

In this round, you’ll need to prove that you understand system design, architecture and the core technologies in your domain. You’re expected to recognize when a design is overly complex and when it becomes a bottleneck for performance or scale.

The interview runs in 1 of 2 ways, and some interviewers mix them:

• A deep-dive into a past project: The interviewer will ask how you contributed to technical conversations and how well you understood a system's design and its limits. They’ll even ask you how you’ve partnered with or influenced engineering teams. One Prepfully candidate reported that they were asked to sketch the system design of an existing project.
• A hypothetical design question: This format requires a set procedure on your end. Our coaches give the following advice for working through a technical question in the loop: 
  - Begin by articulating the purpose of the task and refine its requirements by asking targeted questions. Also write down the assumptions your approach rests on
  - Work back from the customer’s expectations and needs while mentioning the assumption they haven’t stated
  - Show how your solution scales or adapts while planning for growth and demand spikes
  - Base your decision on functional and non-functional reqs and on how components interact and pass data. Stack-rank critical requirements and justify the order of it. Follow best practice for the relevant tech.
  - Build in ops and resilience. Make sure you've got logs and observability so you can debug if you need to.
  - Weigh the pros and cons of each option and then pick the one you’re willing to defend. Even in a hypothetical situation you should mention who you’d bring in before committing like engineers or other stakeholders.
• Finally, quite importantly, ask your recruiter if you’re going to face questions about a specific domain. A candidate interviewing for AWS faced questions entirely related to EC2 instances. Another interviewing in Amazon’s ecommerce search team had several questions related to the tradeoffs in results loading latency vs personalized ranking and how they’d approach this.

Candidates have recently reported facing the following questions:

• Tell me about a technical decision on your product you disagreed with. What did you argue for and how did it turn out?
• Design a service that notifies customers when an out-of-stock item they’ve viewed is back in stock.
• Walk me through the architecture of a product you've owned. What's the first bottleneck as the traffic grows?

This is an hour-long interview with a trained interviewer that’s outside your hiring team. Their role is to ensure that every new hire performs better than 50% of current employees in a similar role. 

In Memoirs of an Amazon Bar Raiser, Carlos Arguelles writes “BRs are a unique part of the Amazon culture. You lead the debrief (which includes all the interviewers in the same room debating their data points) and make the final hire/no hire decision. You have veto power over all hiring decisions (a hire cannot happen without your thumbs up.)”

Most Bar Raiser interviews are mostly behavioral and built around a deep dive/retro on one of your previous projects. They’ll ask about the extent of your contribution or ask you to defend certain decisions you made. 

Generally speaking, you should be prepared for this round to be a rigorous LP-alignment audit with some pressure-testing around your narrative. 

Read our Amazon's Bar Raiser Interview: A Comprehensive Guide to the Process for 6 tips on how to answer their questions.

Amazon grades candidates by rating specific leadership principles as either a Strength (ST), Satisfies (SA), Development Needed (DN), or No Evidence (NE). Interviewers use these ratings to then cast a final vote to hire you on a scale of Strongly Inclined > Inclined > Not Inclined > Strongly Not Inclined.

• L5: $197K
• L6: $298K
• L7: $495K
• L8: $830K

View Amazon PM compensation data on Levels.fyi