Amazon Leadership Principles (SIP)

[Music] hi I'm Eric cuts software development manager at Amazon I'm here today to talk to you about leadership principles and how we interview for them leadership principles at Amazon are used to guide the business in almost every way we use them during career growth discussions making hiring decisions or just day-to-day business decisions you'll know when you're being asked to leadership principle question when you here tell me about a time when for example tell me about a time when you had to make a decision between two different technology choices when answering behavioural questions I like to

think about SBI SBI is situation behavior impact situation what was the situation what was it that your team was trying to achieve behavior what was it that you did what was your plan of action and impact what was the outcome when talking about impact you really want to measure it with data for example how many customers did you impact or what was the dollar value in business let's jump right into it so we're just going to walk through a sample behavioral question I'm gonna play the interviewer and Erica is gonna play the interviewee so let's

get right into it Erica so tell me about a time when you had to make a decision at work but you didn't have all the data available yeah well my team had a big ops issue a few months back where there was an outage and customers weren't getting some of the orders that they needed and so we made the call to roll back okay how did you how did you make that decision what was it based on well we knew stuff was going wrong so we just know that customers not getting what they need well

you just got a role feature back that we deployed okay so this is an example of an incomplete answer and you can kind of see that we didn't quantify the impact it wasn't really clear specifically what Erica did and so you know we're just going to walk through it again and we're gonna tighten it up a little bit so Erica tell me about a time that you had to make a decision at work but you didn't have all the data available that you'd like yeah my team had a big outage a few months back and

we knew that there had been an issue because I received an alarm I was on call and so I responded to the alarm started looking at some of our dashboards and saw that there was a big drop in our order count that usually signifies that something's gone pretty south for the customer but the problem is I didn't have enough time to figure out what had gone wrong at a root cause level so how did you move forward from that it seems like you didn't have all the data that you'd like so so what happened next

what did you do well I knew that I couldn't solve this just by myself because our system is quite large and so I set up a conference call with several of the other engineers in the team and started a divide-and-conquer process and nominated a bunch of folks to start looking into different aspects of the system and start triaging I see so after the investigation what what was the next step what did you do well once we hit about our four even though we didn't know the exact impact on the customer I knew that it was

too risky to continue leaving this feature live in production and so I made the call to do a rollback how did you know that you know this was so important that you wanted to do a rollback and just not continue on with that investigation further well there's a point of diminishing returns with an investigation like this and given the fact that this is a feature that any customer on Amazon can use oh you'd never want to have sustained customer impact like this and we'd already gotten a couple of customer service calls and so once you

have a couple of confirmed customer service cases it's kind of a good best practice to do a rollback and then allow for time to go and do the root cause analysis I see and then so what was the follow-up on this well it was a couple of days of detailed investigation not only on what the actual customer impact was finding out you know the number of customers impacted the dollars that came out of that but also trying to root cause and what subsystem we had a break such that and we couldn't ship the orders that

we needed to ship and so once we determined what that was we came up with an action plan to mitigate it I was responsible for getting all of the partner teams that were involved on board and making sure that they made space to go and deploy a hotfix and then getting that deployed and tested out in production and then finally doing the deployment again great have you seen this issue happen again since no because we were able to root cause that we haven't had any issues but what it did do is it allowed us to

expand our regression test suite great so it looks like you might have prevented additional issues from happening in the future exactly I mean of course you can't always prevent it but we've also taken steps to start monitoring additional services that will help us know that something goes wrong in that subsystem in the future so you can see in the previous example there was very little detail Erica didn't go into what her specific actions were or how they made any decisions what the scope of your work was at the time how many different partners you were

working with and what real mechanisms you use to communicate with people and you can see that in her follow-up answer that she was able to hit on all those points and I felt like it was a pretty good answer Thanks thanks Erica now that you've seen these questions in action here's what you can do sit down and think about your work history write down specifically five or six different experiences and how they might apply to the leadership principle questions one thing to keep in mind during your interviews is not to use the same example every

single time it's okay to look at different aspects of the same problem or your experience but throughout the day you'll probably have one or two behavioral questions for interviewer and so you're gonna want to mix it up a little bit pay special attention to the data points lastly you really want to talk about what did you do versus the team so what was your impact versus what did everybody else do and thanks for watching [Music]