Preparing for your Sr.

Program Manager Interview

Congratulations on your interview invite for a Sr. Program Manager role at Amazon! With your interview coming
up, we wanted to remind you of the prep materials below, along with a few call outs about our interview
process.

• Dive Deep, Invent & Simplify, Earns Trust, Deals with Ambiguity and Bias for Action are important
Leadership Principles (LPs) for our Program Manager candidates. Take a look at your resume and see
which examples can demonstrate and support these leadership principles.
• Keep responses concise. Provide some historic context, limit the amount of jargon, remember to use “I”
when applicable, be sure to mention data (increases, ROI, goals with focus on data). At Amazon our
interviews are very dialog based- be prepared for follow-up questions. Our interviewers are curious
about your impressive background!
• It’s important to not use the same examples during your four, 45 minute interviews. Our MBA alums
suggest creating a matrix with the LPs and 1-2 examples next to each – think LPs on your X-axis and
aligning stories to match on your Y-axis. This will allow you to see which experiences you’ve already
talked about during your interview. If you do feel an example you already used will best answer an
interview question, call it out, and note that you used the example in a previous interview from that day.

Preparing for the Interview

Please check out this link regarding interviewing at Amazon: LINK
Mock Interview Webinar with Amazonians

Webinar: The World Of Program Management

Interviewing Style
We focus on behavioral interviewing (“Give me an example of a time when…”, “Tell me about a specific project
when…”) in order to better understand the granular details of your experience and how you work. When you are
thinking about your answers, please use the “S.T.A.R” method for organizing your responses. Our goal is to
understand the full, end to end explanation of whatever project or challenge you are discussing. i.e., we want to
understand the “Situation”, “Task”, “Action” and “Result”. The interviewers will ask follow-up questions to
ensure we are collecting all of the data that we need about that specific answer.

Leadership Principles (LP’s) – The team will be interviewing you with behavioral questions. Most questions will
be focused around a specific leadership principle to help them understand whether you operate by that
principle and to what degree. Feel free to write the examples out in bullet form utilizing the S.T.A.R. method of
answering, and study them for a bit to ensure you can recall the information easily. We love to hear data and
metrics associated with any answer, so be sure to think about any areas where you can share data. For instance,
if you discuss a new process you wanted to implement, we’d love to know what the outcome was, how it
affected efficiencies, any data around what you learned.

Content Generation
Having varied examples to discuss with the team will be ideal. Here are some helpful tips to generate content
you’d like to share with them. Please go over the LP’s and job description and think of relevant experiences or
accomplishments from your current or past roles that relate to the LP’s, and/or scope of role you are
interviewing for. Be sure to organize your response using the S.T.A.R. format, and have a direct result or
measurable outcome you can share at the end of that story. It would be helpful if you can include relevant
data/metrics and speak to the impact of the example you share.
Themes to incorporate into your content:

• Customer centric & data driven approach with customers/stakeholders; working backwards from the
customer to deliver results
• Scaling out strategy/process for broader impact and consistency
• Using data & anecdotes to drive decisions and influence others*

*It will be highly beneficial if you can demonstrate you are using data in your examples to create strategies,
influence stakeholders/senior leadership, push back when you have a different point of view, create
solutions/efficiencies, improve processes, and/or drive decisions for the business. Coming from a data driven
place and incorporating these themes in your examples/stories will help them stand out to the interview team.