Amazon product managers, can you share your experience of what it’s like working there? Interested in all insight but particularly at the principal and higher level for product focused PM technical roles (no so much TPM).
From the outside it seems Amazon PMs have a lot of ownership and scope. Like it could be really amazing experience to define a strategy and have the resources and team to take it to market. Is that true? Or is that just on the surface?
What are the not so good aspects? Does the culture that engineers there often describe as “unappreciated” apply to PMs as well? Or are the PMs the source of the crappy WLB because they set the direction and expectations?
Overall, what’s it like being a PM at Amazon?
TC: 320K, 12YOE
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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.
2. Ask SDEs for status every 3 hrs, shoot stupid escalation emails, behave like idiots in meetings, fight with other PMs
3. Death