Amazon Vs Microsoft for Product Manager
Just finished final rounds with Amazon & have final rounds with Microsoft next week. Expecting to get offers soon & would appreciate any insight on which is better for Senior Product Manager? Likely will be L6 at AMZN & at least L63 at MSFT. I have 5 YOE at Apple & another FAANG. The role at AMZN is Sr. PM-T on an AWS team. At MSFT, it’s Senior Product Manager but it’s a pretty niche team so I don’t want to give away too much. It’s not Azure or Teams. It seems the general consensus is MSFT > AMZN because of WLB, but I know blind is SWE heavy, so I’m curious specifically about Product Management. How is the Product Management culture at Microsoft vs Amazon? What are the pros / cons? Interestingly, two of the hiring managers I spoke to at AMZN joined as PMs from Microsoft. I didn’t have time to ask them more about it during my interviews though. My team at Apple sucks so staying is really not an option. PMs at Apple differ across teams, but I lean heavily towards the program management side, which is part of the reason why I want to leave. Happy to provide more details via DM. Will update with TC when I get the offers. Edit: I appreciate the votes but please drop a comment if you have specific reason for your vote! Also I have Dropbox & Tiktok interviews lined up. Is it worth it go through the loops for either of those companies if I’m not particularly interested in the products? #amazon #Microsoft #productmanager #pm
Be certain your MSFT role is really product and not program. Everyone is a Program Manager there and do drastically different things.
Thanks for the heads up! Yeah that’s what I gathered from reading past blind posts. The job description is titled “Senior Product Manager” and from what I can tell, it’s a true product role. I also asked the recruiter but they seemed pretty clueless tbh. Is there any other way I can confirm other than asking the hiring manager / team directly?
Microsoft's product manager role tends to be product marketing manager
Chat with the teams or partners you’d work with. They can tell you role expectations outside your HM’s sales pitch.
As for the Microsoft role, are you sure it is for a Product Manager and not Program Manager? There is a huge difference there. Microsoft Program Managers are much more influential in their orgs. They are the ones that do all the Feature planning, customer interactions, project management and are highly technical. Also, the Microsoft Program Manager role is highly visible in their orgs. There are very few Microsoft Product Managers and honestly I’m not sure what they do.. check with your recruiter which it is.
Do you mean that Program Managers have more influence on product roadmaps than Product Managers? That’s pretty unusual. Also, Not sure if you saw this in my reply to the previous commenter, but the job description is titled “Senior Product Manager” and from what I can tell, it’s a true product role. I also asked the recruiter but they seemed pretty clueless tbh. If you’re a Program or Product Manager, I’d be interested to hear more about your perspective— let me know & I can DM you.
On all the teams that I’ve been on, we’ve only had program managers driving long term planning, feature roadmap, customer interaction in addition to the technical discussions (architecture, bug triage, bug scrums). In other words, the program manager performs both PM and TPM roles for the team. They work very closely with their engineering partners and other stakeholders (devs, UX, marketing, sales etc). Honestly, I’ve never worked on a team with a dedicated product manager. For context, I’ve been in Office, Windows and Azure groups. Maybe other non-technical groups of Microsoft may have more product managers. However, in the groups that I’ve been in, it is the program manager who influences product direction.
Amazon for product work (strategy, roadmap, leadership reviews) and Microsoft for program management (feature spec, day to day execution)
If you don’t get downleveled from Amazon then Amazon pays at least 50k more than Microsoft
Oh wow. I didn’t realize the difference would be that much… Does Microsoft not negotiate?
How did u prepare
Would love to hear your offer details
Just stumbled upon this old thread. OP can you update with what the offers were and what you ended up doing?
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Definitely MS unless the Amazon offer is silly money or you can negotiate something like Fridays off.
Ooh that’s an interesting suggestion! I didn’t even consider negotiating for Friday’s off. Is that really a thing?
I know of VPs who negotiated it. In reality likely not but when you have two competing offers one of which you should care less about (Amazon in this case imho) then you can use that to negotiate hard for almost anything. What’s to lose? Nothing.