Why are Amazon Product Management interviews so different?
Apr 11
16 Comments
Amazon PM interviews seem to focus mostly on their LPs, while most other companies, especially Google, strictly focuses on hypothetical questions to see how you think on the spot? Why is that? Why does Amazon care less about how you think on the spot, solving unique hypothetical problems? Why does Google not care about your past experience? Meta focuses mostly on hypotheticals, but does have one behavioral/experience round. Perhaps a mix should be the way to go?
I heard someone from Google say, they don’t want people solving new problems with old solutions. This makes a lot of sense to me and I agree with this philosophy. However, Amazon seems to be doing pretty well innovating new Product as well.
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What’s the last big customer innovation thing Google did? What about Amazon? Still think both are the same?
Amazons approach was more heavily influenced by Jeff Bezos and they believe that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, and that if someone is able to demonstrate their LPs in the past, then they'll be able to demonstrate them in the future as an Amazon employee.
The different approaches results in different types of people joining each company. In my opinion Meta and Google have too much focus on structured thinking and that anyone that is so soon to jump into a framework to devise a product probably isn't doing unstructured thinking at all. Product Management is mostly about structured thinking, but I think Meta and Google take it to such extreme that it hurts creativity and that's reflected in their products and the lack of true innovation.
Not only interviewing, Amazon's entire decision making process and mechanisms are intentionally set in a way to incentivize deliberations, more deep dive (often at expense of speed in decisions) while disincentivizing thinking on the fly and muting out loudest voices in the room.