AMAZON INTERVIEW EXAM REVIEW
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
CUSTOMER OBSESSION - Answer-
Tell me about a long term project that had a significant impact on your business. -
Answer-I used to work at a multi national online/offline courses company with offices in
many countries. My team was one of the biggest teams and part of our job was to check
incoming applications from users to sign up to our education program. That check
included a name check, address format check to send the education materials. And if
we find anything that seems problematic, we would reject the application and sent it
back to the customer to fill the information again. This task was taking about 20% of our
daily activity. After my 3 months in the company I suggested that we automate those
checks as much as we can to save manpower. I became the lead of the project and
started managing tech teams, localization teams and different contributing teams from
different countries. After an effort of 8 months, we were able to automate 80% of those
checks (so, e.g. a tool automatically checks if the address is right for that particular
country). The project was a huge success for the company and I was awarded a
Platinum Star for that project.
How do you go about planning your project / work timelines, what is your most basic
secret? - Answer-I think that the key to achieve any goal is to plan early and to plan in
detail. At the start of my career I was given some tasks to be completed at a set date
but the end result was less optimum than I expected and it was delivered late. From that
time on, I started to plan every project early and in detail, counting all the factors as
much as possible.
Tell me about a time you used technology to improve a metric you measure. What was
the metrics and what was the technology. - Answer-There is always room for
improvement! I used to work at an online marketplace and the sale numbers were quite
good. The thing with online websites and mobile websites is, the technology is
constantly evolving and new solutions for faster products appear constantly. So our
mobile website was pretty decent and did have good loading times, and the customers
were loving it. But I started a project to convert it to Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile
Pages) and Google PWA (Progressive Web Apps). This enabled our mobile website to
be future proof, enabling us to concentrate on other tasks to grow the business.
Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for your customers and got pushback.
How did you solve it? - Answer-For one of our products, the headcount number for
support operations was 5 people and I got word from my superiors that they wanted to
increase the "promised" customer response time from 1 hours to 2 hours in order to
reduce workload. I was really against this and knew that customer support is one of the
most important things, if not the most, for your business to be successful. I researched
,research papers and number to justify my claim that if anything, we should be
increasing our headcount for support. I gave examples from industry leaders and
convinced them to not to change the headcount. Fast forward 1 year, the company was
strongly considering to decrease the response time to 30 minutes across board, since
my product was the one with the best customer happiness score and the most revenue.
THINK BIG - Answer-
Give me an example where you provided an out of the box solution to a problem. -
Answer-I used to work at a multi national online/offline courses company with offices in
many countries. My team was one of the biggest teams and part of our job was to check
incoming applications from users to sign up to our education program. That check
included a name check, address format check to send the education materials. And if
we find anything that seems problematic, we would reject the application and sent it
back to the customer to fill the information again. This task was taking about 20% of our
daily activity. After my 3 months in the company I suggested that we automate those
checks as much as we can to save manpower. I became the lead of the project and
started managing tech teams, localization teams and different contributing teams from
different countries. After an effort of 8 months, we were able to automate 80% of those
checks (so, e.g. a tool automatically checks if the address is right for that particular
country). The project was a huge success for the company and I was awarded a
Platinum Star for that project.
What is your secret in persuading people? - Answer-Communication and the persuasive
power of the numbers. Having good communication lines open goes a long way in
persuading people for your project. Having numbers backing up your idea is the sure-
fire way of getting people on your side.
Tell me about an example where you used an opportunity to start small but made a big
impact at the end. - Answer-I used to work in a company as the person responsible for
online advertising. The initial task given to me was to analyze and improve the ad
spending budget. After careful analysis and number crunching, I convinced the upper
management to shift focus of advertising spending to online for some of our products
because online ads were clearly performing better than traditional ads. So what started
as a "relatively" simple online ad spend analysis turned into a fully fledged re-
organization of our advertising spend. I was able to achieve this by working above and
beyond my line of duty: instead of just looking a to online ad spend numbers, I was
curious and looked at other ad budgets & returns as well, thus prompting a larger scope
of work for me.
Tell me an example where you used "efficiency performance" as metric to drive change
and improve processes. - Answer-I always look at even very simple tasks and question
if they are efficient or not. A simple example of this would be my approach to project
management tools. In my previous company, I have realized that my Team was using a
pre-formatted excel sheet to keep track of their projects, and their statuses. Although
they were very efficient with using Excel, there were newer tools that allows you to
, collaborate more effectively. I persuaded them to switch to that tool after a while.
Although there were some concerns at the beginning, now people swear by it and never
look back. (This sample answer also shows that you try to improve even the small
things in your work environment as well.)
Give me bold idea that you were able to persuade the management to go with? What
was it? Why did you have that idea? - Answer-We were planning the features to put in
our soon-to-be updated website for this financial company( i.e. bank) that I was working.
I was the head of project and to the amaze of my other colleagues, I said that I would
make the frontpage a big search box only. So, there would be no content on the front
page but only a search box. This was obviously not seen before, but I thought that our
frontpage should be a gateway to our services. I wanted the users to leave the
homepage as quickly as possible to their searched product/service (much like
google.com) This idea was discussed a lot and in the end the company implemented it.
It was a huge success and feedback started to pour in about how simple & fast our
website is. Our users liked it a lot and our competitors soon followed suit.
BIAS FOR ACTION - Answer-
Tell me you biggest career crisis and how did you handle it. Did it and well and why? -
Answer-(Similar answer as the question below. Here, you'll need to show that you are
action oriented, but only if you have enough data to back up your action). One time we
were about to launch a product live and just got a "you need to stop this" alert from the
tech team saying that they have found a bug. It was just minutes left for the project to go
live and I could not get a handle of my manager (no phone reception). I quickly sat
down with the tech managers and tried to understand the bug and it's possible effects. It
was an important bug that needed to be fixed. Due to my technical background, I knew
that this would be a problem when we have more than 10.000 concurrent users on the
system which was not expected at least in the first 10 days. The Tech Team assured
me that they can fix it in 3 days so I went ahead and gave the project a go. After the
project is live, the Tech Team implemented a fix in 2 days so everything turned out to be
fine in the end. Should I went ahead and halted the project it would be a much bigger
problem for the company.
How confident are you on making your own decisions? Give an example from the last
two years. - Answer-(You need to show that you are not afraid of taking actions if you
are confident with your decision). One time we were about to launch a product live and
just got a "you need to stop this" alert from the tech team saying that they have found a
bug. It was just minutes left for the project to go live and I could not get a handle of my
manager (no phone reception). I quickly sat down with the tech managers and tried to
understand the bug and it's possible effects. It was an important bug that needed to be
fixed. Due to my technical background, I knew that this would be a problem when we
have more than 10.000 concurrent users on the system which was not expected at least
in the first 10 days. The Tech Team assured me that they can fix it in 3 days so I went
ahead and gave the project a go. After the project is live, the Tech Team implemented a
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
CUSTOMER OBSESSION - Answer-
Tell me about a long term project that had a significant impact on your business. -
Answer-I used to work at a multi national online/offline courses company with offices in
many countries. My team was one of the biggest teams and part of our job was to check
incoming applications from users to sign up to our education program. That check
included a name check, address format check to send the education materials. And if
we find anything that seems problematic, we would reject the application and sent it
back to the customer to fill the information again. This task was taking about 20% of our
daily activity. After my 3 months in the company I suggested that we automate those
checks as much as we can to save manpower. I became the lead of the project and
started managing tech teams, localization teams and different contributing teams from
different countries. After an effort of 8 months, we were able to automate 80% of those
checks (so, e.g. a tool automatically checks if the address is right for that particular
country). The project was a huge success for the company and I was awarded a
Platinum Star for that project.
How do you go about planning your project / work timelines, what is your most basic
secret? - Answer-I think that the key to achieve any goal is to plan early and to plan in
detail. At the start of my career I was given some tasks to be completed at a set date
but the end result was less optimum than I expected and it was delivered late. From that
time on, I started to plan every project early and in detail, counting all the factors as
much as possible.
Tell me about a time you used technology to improve a metric you measure. What was
the metrics and what was the technology. - Answer-There is always room for
improvement! I used to work at an online marketplace and the sale numbers were quite
good. The thing with online websites and mobile websites is, the technology is
constantly evolving and new solutions for faster products appear constantly. So our
mobile website was pretty decent and did have good loading times, and the customers
were loving it. But I started a project to convert it to Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile
Pages) and Google PWA (Progressive Web Apps). This enabled our mobile website to
be future proof, enabling us to concentrate on other tasks to grow the business.
Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for your customers and got pushback.
How did you solve it? - Answer-For one of our products, the headcount number for
support operations was 5 people and I got word from my superiors that they wanted to
increase the "promised" customer response time from 1 hours to 2 hours in order to
reduce workload. I was really against this and knew that customer support is one of the
most important things, if not the most, for your business to be successful. I researched
,research papers and number to justify my claim that if anything, we should be
increasing our headcount for support. I gave examples from industry leaders and
convinced them to not to change the headcount. Fast forward 1 year, the company was
strongly considering to decrease the response time to 30 minutes across board, since
my product was the one with the best customer happiness score and the most revenue.
THINK BIG - Answer-
Give me an example where you provided an out of the box solution to a problem. -
Answer-I used to work at a multi national online/offline courses company with offices in
many countries. My team was one of the biggest teams and part of our job was to check
incoming applications from users to sign up to our education program. That check
included a name check, address format check to send the education materials. And if
we find anything that seems problematic, we would reject the application and sent it
back to the customer to fill the information again. This task was taking about 20% of our
daily activity. After my 3 months in the company I suggested that we automate those
checks as much as we can to save manpower. I became the lead of the project and
started managing tech teams, localization teams and different contributing teams from
different countries. After an effort of 8 months, we were able to automate 80% of those
checks (so, e.g. a tool automatically checks if the address is right for that particular
country). The project was a huge success for the company and I was awarded a
Platinum Star for that project.
What is your secret in persuading people? - Answer-Communication and the persuasive
power of the numbers. Having good communication lines open goes a long way in
persuading people for your project. Having numbers backing up your idea is the sure-
fire way of getting people on your side.
Tell me about an example where you used an opportunity to start small but made a big
impact at the end. - Answer-I used to work in a company as the person responsible for
online advertising. The initial task given to me was to analyze and improve the ad
spending budget. After careful analysis and number crunching, I convinced the upper
management to shift focus of advertising spending to online for some of our products
because online ads were clearly performing better than traditional ads. So what started
as a "relatively" simple online ad spend analysis turned into a fully fledged re-
organization of our advertising spend. I was able to achieve this by working above and
beyond my line of duty: instead of just looking a to online ad spend numbers, I was
curious and looked at other ad budgets & returns as well, thus prompting a larger scope
of work for me.
Tell me an example where you used "efficiency performance" as metric to drive change
and improve processes. - Answer-I always look at even very simple tasks and question
if they are efficient or not. A simple example of this would be my approach to project
management tools. In my previous company, I have realized that my Team was using a
pre-formatted excel sheet to keep track of their projects, and their statuses. Although
they were very efficient with using Excel, there were newer tools that allows you to
, collaborate more effectively. I persuaded them to switch to that tool after a while.
Although there were some concerns at the beginning, now people swear by it and never
look back. (This sample answer also shows that you try to improve even the small
things in your work environment as well.)
Give me bold idea that you were able to persuade the management to go with? What
was it? Why did you have that idea? - Answer-We were planning the features to put in
our soon-to-be updated website for this financial company( i.e. bank) that I was working.
I was the head of project and to the amaze of my other colleagues, I said that I would
make the frontpage a big search box only. So, there would be no content on the front
page but only a search box. This was obviously not seen before, but I thought that our
frontpage should be a gateway to our services. I wanted the users to leave the
homepage as quickly as possible to their searched product/service (much like
google.com) This idea was discussed a lot and in the end the company implemented it.
It was a huge success and feedback started to pour in about how simple & fast our
website is. Our users liked it a lot and our competitors soon followed suit.
BIAS FOR ACTION - Answer-
Tell me you biggest career crisis and how did you handle it. Did it and well and why? -
Answer-(Similar answer as the question below. Here, you'll need to show that you are
action oriented, but only if you have enough data to back up your action). One time we
were about to launch a product live and just got a "you need to stop this" alert from the
tech team saying that they have found a bug. It was just minutes left for the project to go
live and I could not get a handle of my manager (no phone reception). I quickly sat
down with the tech managers and tried to understand the bug and it's possible effects. It
was an important bug that needed to be fixed. Due to my technical background, I knew
that this would be a problem when we have more than 10.000 concurrent users on the
system which was not expected at least in the first 10 days. The Tech Team assured
me that they can fix it in 3 days so I went ahead and gave the project a go. After the
project is live, the Tech Team implemented a fix in 2 days so everything turned out to be
fine in the end. Should I went ahead and halted the project it would be a much bigger
problem for the company.
How confident are you on making your own decisions? Give an example from the last
two years. - Answer-(You need to show that you are not afraid of taking actions if you
are confident with your decision). One time we were about to launch a product live and
just got a "you need to stop this" alert from the tech team saying that they have found a
bug. It was just minutes left for the project to go live and I could not get a handle of my
manager (no phone reception). I quickly sat down with the tech managers and tried to
understand the bug and it's possible effects. It was an important bug that needed to be
fixed. Due to my technical background, I knew that this would be a problem when we
have more than 10.000 concurrent users on the system which was not expected at least
in the first 10 days. The Tech Team assured me that they can fix it in 3 days so I went
ahead and gave the project a go. After the project is live, the Tech Team implemented a
