Answers for the top 5 Amazon "Ownership" leadership principle interview questions

If you're about to interview at Amazon you should learn the 16 Leadership Principles because their interview questions are based on them. 

I've talked about interview questions based on the first principle, Customer Obsession, here. 

The second Amazon leadership principle is "Ownership."

Amazon Leadership Principle #2: Ownership

This is how Amazon explains the principle:

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." 

If you're not clear on what this definition of ownership means exactly, here are some other ways of understanding it. If you show ownership, you will:

• Ignore boundaries between jobs and departments if necessary to get your project done. If you see a problem and it’s not in your department, you will try to fix it.

• Along the same lines, you will manage every dependency and won’t make excuses if something goes wrong. You won't say, "That wasn't my job to take care of."

• Think about the impact of your decisions on other teams, sites and the customer over time.

• Consider future outcomes (scalable, long-term value, etc.)

• Coach and mentor your team to understand the big picture, how their role supports the overall objectives of Amazon, and how it ties to others.

There are different ways your interviewer can ask you about your ownership skills. Here are the top 5 questions, based on my experience with clients.

Top 5 Amazon interview questions asking about ownership

1. Provide an example of when you personally demonstrated ownership.

2. Tell me about a time you went above and beyond.

3. Tell me about a time when you took on something significant outside your area of responsibility. Why was it important? What was the outcome?

4. Describe a project or idea (not necessarily your own) that was implemented primarily because of your efforts. What was your role? What was the outcome?

5. Give an example of when you saw a peer struggling and decided to step in and help. What was the situation and what actions did you take? What was the outcome?

Sample answers for the top 5 ownership questions

Question: Provide an example of when you personally demonstrated ownership

Senior Product Marketing Manager's answer:

“When I was leading the Marketing Services team, we were told to have digital media investments as twenty percent of the product’s fixed marketing expenses in two years. At the time, the digital share was only five percent of expenses, with display and banner ads and some YouTube videos.

The business teams were the key responsible people for budget management and allocation. My role was to give them direction on the most effective way to spend based on the communication strategy. Both marketing teams and the media agencies were hesitant to make such a big shift in a short period because the ROI wasn’t known. My task was to convince the business leaders to invest more on digital campaigns.

I led four major initiatives. First, I collaborated with digital platform owners on Facebook, Twitter, and Google to give training on digital and social media to the marketers and build key campaigns together and used their data combining with brand metrics to evaluate performance. Then I started reverse mentoring in the company. Younger team members showed us how they were interacting with brands and what they liked doing in social media. This increased our organizational competency for digital. I also asked our creative and media agencies to include more digital talent. Last, I restructured the marketing KPIs and brand health tracking to incorporate the evaluation of digital campaigns. This enabled us to learn what drives ROI.

At the end of the second year, more than twenty percent of the budget was being invested in digital. One campaign won the Facebook Cannes award and the other won the Twitter Aviator award.”

This story follows the PAR structure, demonstrates ownership, is about the right length, and is easy to follow. For those reasons, it’s a good story. How could we make it even better? I think this story would be stronger if it had better focus. The candidate telling the story says that her task is to convince business leaders to invest more. When I read this story, it sounds like she was successful in convincing them when she “restructured the marketing KPIs and brand health tracking” to “learn what drives ROI.” However, she provides little detail on that topic and instead talks about other initiatives that were not directly connected to persuading the business leaders. My advice in this case would be to focus more on the main problem (convincing business leaders) and how the candidate solved it (demonstrating ROI).

Let’s look at another example.

Question: Tell me about a time you went above and beyond

Software Developer's answer:

"Above and beyond" is an idiom that means you do more than you’re required to do. One way to think about this is that the something extra you’re doing is something outside your usual focus area.

"While working on my most recent project, our customer asked to add a new feature to the product. While it was a reasonable request, it went beyond the scope of the project we had worked out and there was no time built in to the schedule for it. My manager decided that we couldn't refuse and insisted that we rework the schedule. This change increased my workload about 25% in the same timeframe. I did my best to complete the extra work in the time given by working later at night and also working some of the weekends. Although it wasn't an ideal situation, we managed to pull it off and the customer was satisfied with our work."

This developer should add details about the type of product, the feature, and the exact work she was doing to make for a stronger answer. Why did the manager insist on doing the work? Details help make the story more interesting.

Also, “above and beyond” means extra, so if you do something extra it will be something that isn’t already in your job description. Weren’t the things she was talking about here just her normal everyday job? How are they outside her normal work? I don’t think they actually are, so I don’t think this story would be a good choice to answer this particular question. She could use it for an example of doing something quickly or helping a customer.

Question: Tell me about a time when you took on something significant outside your area of responsibility. Why was it important? What was the outcome?

Operations Manager's answer:

“As a part of a company rebranding, we were moving our site to a new domain. The old domain had gained significant domain authority over the years and, at the time, was generating trials worth $4.50 each, and we were getting approximately 1,000 per day. The goal was to complete the migration while protecting that line of revenue.

I didn’t see anyone treating this project with the sense of urgency or risk mitigation that I thought it needed, so I took over coordinating it, although it would have normally fallen to the marketing team to lead this effort. While I wasn’t an expert, I had researched best practices around a site migration. I was convinced that the key was to migrate the content pages, set up 301 redirects, and have Google re-index the site as quickly as possible. It was inevitable that we’d lose some revenue during the migration, but I knew we could minimize it with decisive action and SEO best practices.

I led the team through the implementation, while carefully monitoring the organic traffic data during the migration. We completed the migration as planned. While we initially saw a decline in organic traffic (as expected), it recovered quickly. We had successfully migrated to the new domain and still met our B2C budget numbers.”

This is a solid answer. The Operations Manager saw an opportunity to help with an important company initiative and showed leadership by taking on a project that was outside of his department.

This is a similar question to the “above and beyond” one, but this is something that is clearly outside of this person’s normal area of work and so it answers the question better than the developer did.

Question: Describe a project or idea (not necessarily your own) that was implemented primarily because of your efforts. What was your role? What was the outcome?

Digital Marketing Manager's answer:

"Last year we weren't getting high enough conversion rates on some of our pages for our newest product. They were well below our goal. I was managing the team whose goal was to fix this. I coordinated our landing page optimization efforts and we updated the UI on10+ landing pages in less than three months. We saw conversion lifts between 25% and 45%."

The structure of the answer is solid but there are missing details and so it’s too short. This person could add details about what the company and products were, what the pages that weren’t converting were, why they weren’t converting, and more details about how she fixed the problem.

What skills should a person in this role have? Add details that show you have those skills in particular when expanding your story.

Question: Give an example of when you saw a peer struggling and decided to step in and help. What was the situation and what actions did you take? What was the outcome?

Senior Business Development Manager's answer:

“At my current job, a recent product launch opened up an opportunity to enter into the financial sector, a new market for us. I had come from this world and knew it intimately. In truth, I was the best qualified person to plan how we would penetrate the market, but I was deep into closing a major deal and didn’t have the bandwidth. My colleague stepped up and was preparing a plan. When he asked for my advice, I saw that he was missing some of the key players in the space and would struggle to penetrate the market.

It wasn’t as simple as me telling him who he needed to talk to. In order to be successful, he needed to approach it in a specific way. The incumbents are very entrenched in the financial sector, and it’s more about the relationships than the products themselves. It was a lot to talk through. I asked him if he was free for dinner, and we worked together on his plan through dinner and well into the evening. I laid out for him who specifically he needed to approach, and how to manage the relationships. I also mentored him on having patience as these deals would take time to develop but would be worth it in the end.

He closed his first deal with a bank in Germany five months later, which would lead to a string of opportunities. We expanded the team, and the financial sector became a major line of business for us.”

I wish that this story had more data, but it’s a compelling story and the BizDev Manager shows maturity and leadership in his answer.