The comprehensive AWS Program Manager Interview Guide

The AWS Program Manager interview process typically looks like this:

• Online assessment 
• Recruiter screen
• Phone screen
• Writing exercise (some roles, commonly reported at L6+)
• Onsite loop of 4-5 interviews with one of them being with a bar raiser.
  Loop covering the following topics:
  Program management
  Stakeholder management
  Leadership Principles
  Role-specific and situational questions
• Debrief and decision

There aren’t any published round names so we’re going by the roles our candidates have reported on their recruiter mails. The whole process usually takes anywhere between 3-6 weeks and Prepfully candidates report an average of 35 days to get hired. 

AWS and Amazon Program Manager roles have different functional turfs. AWS Program Manager postings cover teams such as AWS Developer Experience, AWS Security and Risk Compliance, AWS Services Finance, AWS Partner Agreements and Worldwide Public Sector. Amazon side candidates report Program Manager roles in teams like Logistics and retail. The interview format is standardized across both domains but the specific context of the technical questions changes pretty meaningfully.

Technical Program Manager (TPM) is an entirely different role and has its own interview format with a system design round (or at the very least, a heavy assessment of your technical skills) in it. If that’s the role you’re interviewing for, please refer to our Amazon Technical Program Manager Interview Guide. 

Amazon structures its entire operational culture around its 16 core Leadership Principles (LPs). Each interviewer that you'll meet in your loop will be explicitly assigned to evaluate about 2-3 of these.  

We discuss the LPs that matter the most to Program Management candidates in detail in the onsite interviews section of this guide. 

Some AWS applicants are asked to fill out an online assessment. We’ve seen 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.

Some candidates had to also submit a write-up answering a questionnaire mostly about their background and experience.  

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
• Ask which level you’re being considered for so you know if you should anticipate the writing exercise

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 is positioned as the gatekeeper to the onsite interviews. They’ll discuss your past project management track record and your LP-alignment and both portions carry equal weight.

Interviewers usually warm up to the deep-dive on the LPs with a simple “tell me about yourself” and then examine specific examples from your past that show how you exhibited them. They’ll ask you questions like:

• Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a customer
• Have you ever panicked that you wouldn’t meet a commitment you promised? What happened at the end?

Then, interviewers will get into questions about a major program you’ve listed on your resume and ask about:

• How you manage stakeholders
• How you manage time and set priorities
• Your cross-team/cross-functional experience (that you should back with data and examples) 
• How you broke down silos and helped build partnerships across different teams and functions
• Your track record of guiding production launches over the finish line

This call is meant to discuss your personal involvement in these decisions along with the scope and impact it had. Make sure you clearly mention the boundaries of your contribution to every question or follow-up you’re asked. We know it’s super cliched advice to say “avoid the we, focus on the I” in these interviews, but we are going to repeat it anyway because we’ve seen this continue to be one of the most common mistakes candidates make in their answers.

Remember, when you’re asked to walk through a program, interviewers want the ENTIRE lifecycle. Our coaches recommend that you explicitly cover these details:

• how you agreed upon the scope with the stakeholders and program sponsor involved. 
• resourcing and funding 
• design and implementation
• monitoring the program post-launch 
• reporting to leadership

Any answer about prioritization should connect the decision to business impact and your org’s strategy by default. The interviewer may not keep digging until you get there so bring it up proactively. 

This is a take-home narrative assignment that’s applicable only to certain roles and is pretty common for L6+ candidates. About 2 days before you begin your onsite loop, you’ll be asked to submit a written assessment that’s a 2-4 page “business narrative”. You’ll have a choice between two prompts. 

Typically, the prompt will ask you to narrate a past achievement asking you to go into details like what the setup was, your challenge specifically, how you went about solving it and what outcomes you can put numbers to (exactly like the STAR framework).

You’ll be expected to submit a plain text doc with no embedded charts or images because the whole assignment’s goal is to evaluate how well you structure your complex logic in writing. This is exactly how Amazon works internally, where teams write docs instead of building slide decks to pitch their decisions.

For this assignment, expect prompts like:

• What is the most innovative thing you’ve ever done?
• Write about a recent judgment call you made on a business issue that couldn’t be analyzed beforehand because of time/information constraints. 
• Write about a time you were able to simplify the lives of customers. 

Both your HM and the bar raiser (amongst others probably) are going to read this. 

Like with any written doc, you'll want to prioritize scannability. Reach for bullets wherever you can and be intentional about your phrasing i.e. don't ramble. Have copious evidence that you’ve actually put in the work and don't leave the overall/obvious question hanging.

Most importantly, pick a story you won’t be using for the onsite loop. When interviewers compare notes in the debrief, a repetitive story is usually viewed as lack of breadth.

The onsite loop is a set of 4-5 behavioral interviews that are each 60 minutes long. These interviews exist to test how well you exhibit Amazon’s list of favourable traits in program managers. They expect you to be:

• Solutions-oriented
• Data-driven
• Results-driven
• User-centric
• Adaptable
• Risk-focused

Every interview uses the same format so the structure comes from who’s interviewing you. Candidates usually describe this lineup:

• The HM
• A program manager that’s at the same level or close 
• A stakeholder from a team the role works with
• The HM’s manager/another senior 
• The Bar Raiser

The Bar Raiser is a trained interviewer that’s outside your hiring team. Their role, as is in their interviewing title, is to ensure that every new hire performs better than 50% of current employees in a similar role. And through this judgement they ensure they constantly “raise the average bar” in terms of the average employee’s skills at Amazon. They lead the debrief at the end of the onsite loop and have veto power over all hiring decisions. A hire cannot happen without their approval. 

Our coaches say that each interviewer is assigned with specific competencies to evaluate based on the LPs. Interviewers reportedly choose from a set of questions tied to each LP but don’t tell you what LP is being tested directly. 

In each round, you’ll face 2-3 questions and most of the evaluation lives in your answers to the relentless follow-ups to each question. 

Themes of the Onsite Loop:

We went straight to the source and asked the AWS interviewers and hiring managers on our platform to give us a list of questions they like to ask candidates. We’ve mapped them into 4 groups - the first 2 being official competencies named by Amazon - so you know what you’re about to face, regardless of who the interviewer is. 

• Program management: These questions centre on your ownership of the entire product release life cycle and how you did your best to hold it to the highest standards. You’ll also be asked to bring receipts like data that shows the scope and scale of your work, be it within the team or across functions. Managing time and setting priorities are also popular topics of conversation in this bucket. 
• Stakeholder management: These questions examine how you work with business partners to understand their challenges and come up with practical solutions. More specifically:
  - driving consensus between stakeholder groups with different goals 
  - negotiating with internal and external parties
  - influencing without formal authority
  - building a network/social capital of trusted peers and creating outcomes that benefit every stakeholder

Stakeholder questions also test how you explain one program to different audiences. Zohaib Mohammed, Manager and a bar raiser at Amazon, says he values candidates who adjust their communication to suit  the listener.  Whether it's simplifying a roadmap for a VP or getting into details with engineers, that adaptability reads as a sign of leadership.

• Role-specific and situational questions: Some loops add questions tied to the team’s domain such as data center and hardware deployment for an infra team. Candidates have even reported questions about their experience with AI and process automation.
• Leadership Principles: which deserves a section of its own. 

How Amazon evaluates AWS Program Management candidates against its Leadership Principles

Our coaches have listed the load-bearing LPs for program managers and the details your story bank should feature for each of them so you can stand out as an excellent candidate.

a. Customer Obsession: 

- Who the customer was and how you weighed the impact on them before you acted

- How you actively collected data/feedback and what changed since you acquired these

- A time you stood your ground/pushed back for what was best for the customer in the long-term

- How you strive to meet commitments or what you do when it slips and you have to earn back their trust. 

b. Ownership

- A problem you took the lead on solving, including when you stepped into the breach 

- A mistake you made and learned from

- Getting a quick fix without shooting yourself (or the business) in the foot 

- How you helped unblock a colleague 

- An account of a setback that doesn’t point fingers at anyone

c. Invent and Simplify

- An example of you breaking the mould and coming up with a new idea/method to solve a problem

- Simplifying a complex process by cutting down the number of steps or people involved

- How you shared what you discovered with other teams

- Ideas you looked for outside your own team

- How you encouraged others to explore new ideas

d. Bias for Action

- Examples of you making educated guesses on the fly and if that decision could be reversed (which Amazon calls a two-way door)

- How you gathered whatever data you could in the time you had

- The progress you made while the bigger picture was still hazy 

- When you consulted with people and when you didn’t need to 

- How you measured success once you went live

e. Dive Deep

- How you meticulously define and calculate metrics

- Peeling back the layers on an assumption or number that didn’t match what people were telling you

f. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

- A position you proposed and backed with data

- How you challenged a decision you disagreed with (bonus if they’re senior to you)

- If you’ve ever taken and stood by a decision that a majority of the team opposed and how that worked out for you

- How you stood by a customer’s interest to settle a disagreement on direction 

Interviewer and candidate reported questions

Apart from the kind of questions you can deduce just by reading the previous section, we’d like you to be prepared to answer questions like:

• Tell me about a time you used data to improve a process
• Tell me about a time you went out of your comfort zone. What did you do? 
• Could you tell me about your biggest professional failure? 
• Tell me about a time you had a complicated customer. How did you gain their trust? Would you have done something different knowing what you know now?
• Tell me about a time when you or your team were more than halfway to meeting a goal when you realized it may not be the right goal or may have unintended consequences.
• How do you ask for more funding?
• Tell me about something you built for your own program that other teams now use.
• Tell me about a time you killed a program or project you had started yourself. What told you to stop, and how did you tell the people who had worked on it?

Advice from Prepfully’s experts to ace the interview

• Amazon suggests that you frame behavioral answers using the STAR framework. To give you a better edge, we 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. You end each story with a personal takeaway and how it changed the way you work. This way, you’ll demonstrate intellectual humility which implicitly links to a lot of the LPs. Read more on Preparing for Amazon’s behavioral interview. 
• Learn to recognize which principle is being tested with each question. It’s easy to identify them when they’re listed under a subheading but under the pressure of the interview, it’s harder to gauge. Get in touch with an AWS Program Manager interview coach to simulate this interview loop. Your performance in this loop rests entirely on the quality of your stories and the way you articulate them. Have your story bank vetted by a coach who has interviewed candidates at Amazon. They know what interviewers look for, and they can help you bring it out in your own experience.

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.

• L4: $118K 
• L5: $134K
• L6: $207K 
• L7: $287K 

View AWS Program Manager compensation data on Levels.fyi