Amazon product managers

Oct 11, 2018 16 Comments

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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TOP 16 Comments
  • Amazon / Mgmt
    AMZN crash

    Go to company page Amazon Mgmt

    AMZN crash
    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.
    Oct 11, 2018 3
  • Google
    syetfdg

    Go to company page Google

    PRE
    Amazon
    syetfdg
    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
    Oct 11, 2018 1
  • Amazon
    Iqxg72

    Go to company page Amazon

    Iqxg72
    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.
    Oct 11, 2018 3
    • Amazon
      Iqxg72

      Go to company page Amazon

      Iqxg72
      While I disagree with you (Amazon alumni at fb get some of the highest performance ratings for example) this is a tangential point, the core question was about job, responsibility and ownership, not average quality of PM talent. But to directly answer this, the PM title at Amazon is overused, it is given to program management jobs too so yes some PMs who do not know how to product manage can get a product manager title and not do a product management job. Lastly, you shouldn’t share numbers about echo, especially false ones...
      Oct 12, 2018
    • Amazon
      azmix

      Go to company page Amazon

      azmix
      Facebook Home phone didn’t even see the market, so I would caution about using one product failure to generalize qualities of the entire fob family. Hiring good product managers is difficult in Seattle in part because there are not many companies that are able to make competitive offers. With Facebook and Google attempting to downlevel Amazon hires, they cannot afford our best L7 and even L6 PMs. Who would want to go to work on product at Facebook as L5 anyways?
      Oct 12, 2018
  • New / Eng
    Simian25

    New Eng

    Simian25
    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.
    Oct 11, 2018 0
  • 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.
    Oct 13, 2018 2
    • Amazon
      Iqxg72

      Go to company page Amazon

      Iqxg72
      PMT is a flawed title now. PMTs are being reclassified because it was overused. It’s simple, find a team with a PM job that is an actual PM job. Doesn’t matter PMT or PM title. Ask a simple question to clarify, how many dedicated engineers will I work with. If you don’t hear the word dedicated then skip, and if you are a principal just make sure you get 10+. This is my 2 cents to filter out things. PM versus PMT is a fad that’s going away this month... so ignore it
      Oct 13, 2018
    • New / Eng
      I’m bald

      New Eng

      I’m bald
      +1 to lqxg72. You do not want to be in any org where PMs are constantly fighting each other to get engineering resources. It’s not a healthy environment, especially when incompetent management can’t hire enough engineers to adequately allow PMs to do their work.
      Oct 13, 2018