All my dear Amazonians, I joined Amazon this week as a L5 SDM to work on their emerging product at Lab126. I am going through all the training videos, documents and suggested set ups outlined by my manager in the on-boarding plan. While I am planning to check off all the items per week, what are the most important things I should be learning, doing during my first quarter for successful beginning? Who should be my mentor? What are the expectations from L5 SDM with 2-3 years of management experience? What I should avoid? #tech #amazon #on-boarding #faang #help
L5 SDM external hire? Or was down leveled?
I was down leveled. Any pointers for new-to-Amazon manager?
L5 SDM have hard time in Amazon as L6 managers are almost pushing decisions and driving. Plan to get L6 in 4 or 6 quarters. Do the first time manager training at Amazon. Understand the promo process for you and for your team. If you team has L4s or only new L5s try to get L6 support you or some senior L5.
did you go through pip training video? 🤣
Before I visit pip training video, would like to at least try to learn their ways! There are so many people working since 10+ years, they are surviving for many reasons, I would like to know those.
Managers are powerful here. They have the power to decide everything for the engineers here on the team. At the same time listen to your engineers. Let them decide the process. Your job is to listen to them and make their life easier. We get questions on connections about the managers performance and work. You wanna make sure they're always high. But yeah basically don't be a dick and lose all your ego. Its not about you anymore and should be about the engineers
Thanks for your feedback, very valuable. If reports are supposed to decide the process, what managers are supposed to accomplish to get promoted or assumed as high performers?
Well amazon is data driven. So lots of data points. Deliveries from your team. Low sev 2 and ticket counts. Promotions within the team. Cross team co-ordination. If you're in aws then maybe the revenue too. If your project becomes famous obviously it grows and so you need more people and you go up. But I feel this is a conversation better had with your manager
Hey, you are off to a great start by looking for ways to do well. I would say that one thing where Amazon is different is deep dive. If you attend a meeting, you are expected to have crisp answers to all potential questions. And for about 20% it will be OK to say, I don’t know but I will follow up on email by such and such date. Other companies don’t work this way. In other companies, it is OK to say “I have to ask xyz in my team as he has the details”. Those only are allowed rarely. But to establish your brand, you should use those options rarely. All the best.
This is a great inside scoop! Thanks for the share @ifjrbbab12. Between how do I find mentors? Do you have one?
Yes but I’m L7. You should definitely get a mentor. You should find an L6 SDM to mentor you.
Thanks to all who provided great information here. I would also like to know who can be my mentor? Is it better to have external team member as one's mentor or someone at high rank from your team okay?
External
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You can start by using the correct name of the org....Lab126
Lol! Fixed the typo!