How to answer interview questions about the Amazon leadership principle “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility”
The sixteenth Amazon leadership principle is "Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.” If you’re preparing for an interview at Amazon, you should practice answering questions based on this leadership principle.
If you don’t know about the 16 Amazon leadership principles, read this article about interviewing at Amazon first.
How Amazon explains the “Success and Scale” leadership principle
The sixteenth Amazon Leadership Principle is “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.”
This is how Amazon explains the principle:
We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
What does the “Success and Scale ” leadership principle mean?
The “Success and Scale” principle is Amazon recognizing its immense impact, on its customers, its employees, its partners, and the larger community. The principle challenges leaders at Amazon to acknowledge and account for this impact as a normal part of doing business.
This is the key sentence in the principle: We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large.
If we break down that sentence, we’ll start to see some familiar patterns that are consistent with other principles.
Similar to Customer Obsession
For example, “be better for our customers” sounds a lot like leadership principle #1, “Customer Obsession.” Check out my previous post to get up to speed on “Customer Obsession.”
Similar to Hire and Develop and Earth’s Best Employer
The next part of that key sentence from principle #16 is “be better for our employees,” which may remind you of leadership principle #6, “Hire and Develop the Best” and principle #15, “Strive to be Earth's Best Employer.” If you’re not familiar with how to show you care about your employees, read about these other two principles in my previous posts.
Partners are similar to customers
After customers and employees the principle mentions “Be better for our partners.” The idea behind this phrase is similar to caring about customers, but extends this mindset to partners. If you do deal with partners, think about the stories you’ve created for “Customer Obsession” about helping customers. You could possibly reframe those stories so that they show how you’ve helped or prioritized your partners. If you’re in a job that includes working with partners, you may have been thinking of them as your customers and created these stories already. If you don’t deal with partners, you won’t be asked about those relationships.
Community impact
“Be better for the world at large.” This phrase and way of working hasn’t really been covered by the previous leadership principles. This addition is a response to the media, societal, and government scrutiny that Amazon has been getting over the past few years. What does this addition to the principles mean for you and your candidacy at Amazon?
When you’re preparing to answer questions for this principle, my advice is to focus on the impact your work has had beyond your company and your customers. Depending on the types of companies you’ve worked for or your roles in those companies, you may need to brainstorm a bit to come up with good stories for your interview. In all likelihood, you can draw a direct line between your activities in your previous jobs and the benefit those activities had on the company and the customers. Now try to think beyond that. For example, what about the communities in which those customers live? Did your work affect those communities? How did that factor into your thinking and planning?
Interview questions related to “Success and Scale”
If your interviewer asks about this leadership principle, he or she might ask one of the following questions:
About customers: See the questions under “Customer Obsession.”
About employees: See the questions under “Hire and Develop the Best” and “Strive to be the Earth’s Best Employer.”
About partners:
Tell me about a time you had to evaluate a potential strategic partnership. What approach did you take? Did you perform your evaluation using any particular framework?
How have you developed and maintained a partner relationship?
When did you have a difficult situation with a partner? What was the problem and how did you resolve it?
When did you have to say no to a partner? How did you handle it?
Have you ever lost a partner? What was the situation?
When have you gone out of your way to help a partner?
When have you done something to improve the process for your partner ?
Tell me about a time you worked with a partner to achieve scale that would have otherwise been impossible.
About the world:
As you conduct internal and external business activities, how do you promote and maintain social, ethical, and organizational norms?
Tell me about how you think about your work impacting the world.
Tell me about a time where you failed to anticipate the secondary effects of a project you worked on. How did you prevent this from happening in future projects?
How many stories do I need for this principle?
Most people say that you should have two examples for each principle. That’s a good benchmark for this one, although you can see under “Hire and Develop” there are many subcategories, so if you’re a people manager two isn’t going to be enough.
If you’re a people manager you should spend quite a bit of time on the “Hire” questions.
How to answer interview questions about the “Success and Scale” Amazon leadership principle
The key to answering these questions is to demonstrate certain skills in your answers. You’ll want to show that:
You understand what it means to work at a large scale, meaning products and initiatives that could impact millions of people.
You have enough humility to know that, even when you’ve had successes, you recognize the opportunities for further improvements.
You don’t “settle” for success and have a mindset that seeks to improve and optimize.
You think deeply about the impact your work has on customers, partners, and communities, and you seek to account for secondary and potentially unintended consequences of that work.
Sample answers for the “Success and Scale” principle
Question: Tell me about a time you worked with a partner to achieve scale that would have otherwise been impossible.
Answer by a Business Development Manager
I worked in BizDev for X, a SaaS company, focused primarily on market opportunities for expansion. Our product had broad appeal across a number of markets and customer segments. The problem was that some of the most attractive markets were difficult to penetrate, and our standard way of selling into those markets wouldn’t work. I was specifically interested in the government sector, which is highly regulated as you can imagine. We lacked the relationships, the regulatory compliance, and the experience to sell into government agencies, but as I said, our product was highly desirable to the customers there. My solution was to partner with resellers.
Before I was brought on, the company had considered using resellers, but the exec team, and the CFO in particular, thought the cost was too high. If you’re unfamiliar with just how difficult it is to enter the government sector, then yes, the cost, usually 25% or so, does seem high, so I definitely understood the hesitation. But in many ways, using a reseller in this situation was a no-brainer. I just had to help the rest of the organization see that. Working with a financial analyst on the CFO’s team, I modeled the time and cost associated with using a reseller versus trying to sell into the government space alone. The time and cost to achieve regulatory compliance alone justified using a reseller, but I did the work regardless. I used the results of the financial model to write up a proper business case, and I presented that case to the exec team.
To my surprise, they were still hesitant and felt like they needed to run it by the board. Fortunately, the board included members who had seen deals like the one I was proposing bear fruit, and we received approval to work with resellers. From there, it was just a matter of finding the right reseller for us. Within one year from the time I submitted my proposal, we had made our first sale to a government agency through our reseller. That deal was small, just five figures, but as I had hoped, it opened the door for us and over the course of the next two years, the government became a multimillion dollar revenue stream for the organization. I went on to use the same reseller framework to expand into other markets, such as the higher ed academic space.
Question: Tell me about a time where you failed to anticipate the secondary effects of a project you worked on. How did you prevent this from happening in future projects?
Answer given by a VP of Maintenance and Operations
I was working for a company that built and leased cell towers to the big cell phone providers. We were responsible for the maintenance and operation of the towers, and I headed up the maintenance team for all North American towers. You might be surprised to hear this, but our biggest cost was the on-site inspections, which were required as a part of the leasing terms. Honestly, I thought monthly inspections were unnecessary, but I had to abide by the terms, and so every month for every tower, we sent someone on site for a full inspection. I should add that these inspections were dangerous. While we had had just a few injuries (and no fatalities), the thought of an equipment failure that led to someone on my team falling from the top of one of those towers kept me up at night.
Our company had a goal to go public within two years, and ahead of that, I was eager to reduce costs and increase safety without cutting corners on the inspections. After some research and analysis with the team, we determined that we could begin using drones to meet the terms of the license, and we were comfortable that we could check everything else from the ground. Twice a year, we’d still have to send someone up the tower for a closer inspection, but for the rest, the drones would cover it. This approach would cut the time for an inspection by a third, and of course, much safer all around. Win-win, right? I couldn’t wait to present this plan to the higher-ups.
To my surprise, not everyone shared my excitement, which in all honesty was a huge miss on my part. While the union was happy about the increase in safety, they objected to the potentially reduced work hours and also the inspectors lacked the expertise to operate the drones. Many team members were very concerned about losing their jobs all together. In my excitement, I had failed to consider the impact on them, their jobs, and their families. In the end, we were able to address this by retraining the inspectors and restructuring their pay incentives, where they were actually rewarded not punished for more efficient inspections. And I learned a lesson about thinking through the implications beyond cost in creating operational efficiencies.
