Amazon product managers

1. Birth 2. Ask SDEs for status every 3 hrs, shoot stupid escalation emails, behave like idiots in meetings, fight with other PMs 3. Death

There's an enormous burden to do things the "peculiar Amazonian way" which involves (1) incredible pressure to micromanage a shitton of business metrics, (2) nonstop writing of longass documents that are judged for how they adhere to Amazonian style of writing and formatting versus actual product vision, and (3) attending weekly and monthly meetings that constantly review these micromanaged business metrics and long documents repeatedly and where you posture as much as possible during these meetings to demonstrate your commitment and value to doing things the Amazonian way. It's all rooted in Amazon's history of tracking razor thin profit margins of their e-commerce business and Jeff's fetishization of writing documents in a certain quirky formatting. It might have made sense in the context of the e-commerce site, but in the context of everything else it tends to make PMs focus on trees instead of the forest, which can manifest itself as micromanaging the heck out of engineers and designers to reach local maximums to see small metric improvements versus focusing on whether the vision and process is right. Amazon's tradition of PMing also tends to have pretty bad frameworks for how to validate and deliver on product strategies and visions aside from gut intuitions of director level leadership, which often makes things hit-or-miss and leads to many spectacular failures and few major successes. The org I'm in has existed for several years and has about 2 dozen PMs and they've failed to make any efforts to actually talk to customers and solely rely on interpreting metrics and customer support feedback. There's a reason why Amazon doesn't have a lot of good products and basically only does well in providing technical or business platforms for other companies' products or content to shine. I came into this company expecting worse product and design process than other FANG companies and even then I'm really appalled by how primitive the thinking and processes are here. The cult-like adherence to the way of doing things doesn't help in giving flexibility to do things differently. TL;DR: Amazon product managers are glorified business analysts that constantly prepare TPS reports (in the Office Space sense) and are their director's slaves marching death marches toward their director's arbitrary product vision.

Really insightful and consistent with what I’ve heard from others. That doesn’t sound like a great environment for PMs either. I know PMs that left Microsoft for Amazon and came back within a few months. I think I understand why now.

Amazon PMs spend >50% time on useless administrative tasks such as preparing, reviewing, re-reviewing MBR/QBR docs, along with other nonsense like writing more PRFAQ docs and reviewing them to death. This is not what PMs are for. At amazon they’re just glorified program managers and MBA types.

Don’t listen to anyone here, I worked in PM at Facebook and amazon including startups, Amazon does PM right in many places and what you learn and ship is far beyond other places. Simply look at results and pace. Amazon is Amazon for a reason. Direct message me if you want to hear more concrete things and not hear from bitter people. I have a principal pm job open.

I would suggest to look for Product Manager - Technical (PMT) roles. We have very few L8 ICs though.

AMZN crash - is the experience you describe particularly prevalent in non-technical vs. technical Product Management roles (PMT)? I would think the things you describe would be more prevalent in inherently non-technical roles. I am at least taking away that there is a wide range of experiences for PMs at Amazon depending on the team and area you are in.