 Hi, my name is Jenna Piscopo. I'm a technical recruiter with Amazon. I have been with the company for over two and a half years. I support the Last Smile products and tech org, which is part of Operations Technology. I currently own the Product Manager technical space for a few of our leaders. The Last Smile org produces both technical and non-technical products. Last Smile just means in terms of transportation and logistics that last leg of the journey of the package getting from Amazon's hands into the customer's hands. So a few examples. If you have seen the grayish blue prime branded vans delivering packages probably to your house, that is our DSP program that we build a lot of their technology for both the drivers, the owner operators of the businesses, and we also have Amazon Flex. That's a flexible driver program where an individual drives their own vehicle. It's largely what supports prime now. So anything in that ultra fast one to two hour delivery time frame, but they can also deliver regular packages. Those are just a couple of our businesses. We also own the end customer communication post purchase. When you've got a package on the way and you receive a notification that your packages tend stops away, track it here, we own that. Then from a separate tech perspective, we build out our own mapping systems, which funnels into our route optimization algorithms, and all of that funnels into the app that all of our drivers use from checking packages in and out of delivery stations, and how they are routed and navigate throughout their day, although they're different stops, even up to taking that picture of the package on your front porch and sending it to real time or getting any special instructions of where you might want your package placed, maybe on the back porch or to beware of dog. We do a lot of things in the org, a lot of different types of products, both technical and non-technical. I'm excited to share my experience with you in terms of recruiting for this really awesome space. I will go over a few different sections today. First, I'll dive into what is product management at Amazon. Then I will talk to you about understanding the job descriptions. I know that can be a little cryptic sometimes. I want to share some insight with that. Then I'll go into how to bridge understanding the job description, into how to build your resume to make it really pop when a recruiter or a hiring manager is reviewing it. Then we'll just cover some tips and tricks about interviewing at Amazon, mainly the leadership principles and the STAR method, but also some product-specific tips and tricks and how the leadership principles really apply to the product space. I'm very excited to be here with you. I hope this is going to be helpful. You can always follow up with questions on LinkedIn and yeah, let's get started. What is product management at Amazon? We are looking for the end-to-end product management skillset. Starting with working back from the end-customer, creating product vision, gathering business requirements, building out the product roadmap, and partnering cross-functionally with various tech and business teams to execute on that roadmap. The difference between a product manager and a product manager technical is going to be the technical depth and understanding of the individual as well as the expectations of the role and partner teams of their contribution to technical discussions. For the T, the technical aspect, you would not be expected to code. However, if you were whiteboarding as a product manager technical PMT, you might be drawing out components, inputs and outputs, having conversations with tech teams and leaders about product and feature prioritization, technology trade-offs. You are able to identify bottlenecks in system design and architecture, and you can contribute to the tech conversations and critique a system design or architecture. The TPM, Technical Program Manager and SDM, Software Development Manager, as well as the tech teams are tasked with actually drilling down on the tech requirements and designing and building out the system. However, the PMT is tasked with partnering with them, essentially speaking both languages of the business side and the tech side and able to translate between the two. Now, TPM, Technical Program Manager, is an acronym that can sometimes be confused with PMT. Amazon does have a significant difference between program management and product management. One of the biggest is going to be the vision, the product vision. A program manager already is handed the vision and builds out and monitors a program. A product manager is a non-technical job family. However, they could be working with non-technical products or still working with technical products. I have several product managers that do partner closely with tech teams. The difference being that the expectations of their technical contribution is a little bit less. All right, switching gears, let's talk about understanding the job description. Two main areas I want to cover our basic versus preferred qualifications, also leveling the difference between the titles of senior versus principal versus senior manager. And let's pull up a job description. Now, this is one of the roles I'm supporting. It's a senior product manager technical for the driver experience team. The job description starts with an outline of the team in org, what we do, dives a little bit more into the role and descriptions of the job functions. This is the key area I want to talk about, the basic and preferred qualifications. Now, I can't speak to how other companies label these or how they follow guidelines, but for compliance Amazon does specify basic and preferred as two different things. Basic qualifications are going to be mandatory, non-negotiable, easily discerned from a resume facts. So a bachelor's degree. Five years of experience in product, program, business development or technology. We do use this as a standard basic qualification. Again, as different companies give different titles to what might be a product job function, we want to be inclusive of that experience. Experience with end-to-end product delivery, experience overseeing product roadmap strategy and definition, experience with feature delivery and trade-offs of a product, experience contributing to engineering discussions around technology decisions and strategy related to a product. So again, easily discerned from a resume, these are the key things that we look for in a resume. I will go into that a bit more later. The preferred qualifications are going to be the nice to haves like an MBA or the soft skills like strong oral and written communication. In reality, the basic qualifications are what you need for Amazon to consider you for that role. However, having some of the preferred qualifications is probably what they're going to be really looking for for a candidate that would really be strong and set up for success in this role. So as you're looking through job descriptions, understanding the difference between the two and if it says five years of experience in specifically product management, we need to be able to see that on your resume. If you have 10 years experience as a software engineer and one year experience as a product owner, one year experience as a business analyst and one year experience as a product manager, technically you would not be qualified for this role with the basic qualifications and how we have to operate based on compliance. So please do pay attention to those as you are looking through job descriptions. Next is leveling. So product management at Amazon, it is going to be generally a mid-high to high level role. So if you're looking at specifically product or PMT roles on the Amazon jobs website, you'll see a minimum five years experience. That is going to be for a senior PM or senior PMT. Going to the next level up is both principal and senior manager. They are at the same level. Principal denotes an individual contributor versus a senior manager, which is going to be a people manager. At the principal level, generally for PMT, we're going to be looking for a minimum of eight years end-to-end product management experience. For a senior manager, it can vary, I'd say eight to 10 years of end-to-end product management experience plus five or six years of leading teams and being a people manager. Again, these are pretty high level roles. So a people manager of people managers or a people manager of individual contributors kind of depends on the specific role and team, but those are the things that they're going to be looking for in a resume. There is one level below senior, which would just be product manager or product manager technical. I'd say basic qualifications for that is going to be maybe three to four years product management experience. So for Amazon, that's going to be kind of the entry level product management role and then going up from there. So a good trajectory for somebody who's got a couple of years of product management experience, look for that role that specifies product manager or PMT, no senior or principal in front of it. And that was going to be the right level for just a few years of experience and kind of getting on board with Amazon. The one thing if a basic qualification is that you have specific experience, again, they will be looking for that on your resume. So if you don't have any product experience or in terms of actual in the workplace professional experience, then they will not consider you for that role. So just understand kind of where your actual experience, how it's demonstrated on your resume, measures up to what the job description is and what is necessary for being considered for that role. Next, let's talk about how to bridge from the information you gathered in the job description to how to build your resume around that. There are obviously the key things that we look for when reviewing a resume, ensuring that all of the basic qualifications are met. And of course, looking for some of those preferred qualifications as well. A couple of keys though are the keywords. So if you take the end-to-end product management skills, like product vision or product strategy, roadmap, stakeholder management, things like that, when we see those in resumes, those are the kind of keywords that really pop out that we look for that helps us understand that you are doing the type of job and you have the skills that we're looking for. Really what we're gonna be looking for beyond that though too is really understanding what you have owned as well as what you've delivered and then what the impact was. This will bridge into how we interview at Amazon but we wanna be able to see that in the resume too. So any kind of data or metrics that you're able to share about what your impact was is going to be really helpful for us to understand if we think you could be a great candidate for the role. This also goes for LinkedIn profiles as well. If you have a decent amount of information on your LinkedIn profile, chances are that recruiters, as we are using LinkedIn recruiter to search for potential candidates, they will see your profile, they'll see what you've done and they're gonna be more excited about talking to you if they can see some of that information versus just a title and years of experience. That's another thing again with the basic qualifications. For each role that you put on your resume, make sure that you have the dates months and years so that we can understand how long you were there too. That's gonna be a really easy screen in or screen out as we're initially reviewing a resume. All right, so again, keywords are all about the product management. So product vision, product strategy, roadmap, partnering cross-functionally, if you can put in anything that denotes the scope and scale of what you've done, that's also going to help. Amazon is obviously one of the larger companies out there and we don't expect that everybody will have experience working at one of the top four companies, but it will help us to understand if you would be set up for success in this space if we know what scope and scale you've operated at before. Your resume or CV or LinkedIn profile is the first introduction and representation of you to recruiters, hiring managers, or people that might be interested in considering you for a role. So we want this to be something that stands out that is memorable. I really like to have more actionable take charge words in my resume rather than passive. So starting off bullet points under a particular role, talking about what your role responsibilities were, what you owned, what you contributed, what you delivered, having poppy words to start off those bullet points can make a huge impact and leave a very different feel with the person reading it. So words like envisioned, drove, championed, pioneered, led, those are words that really will stand out to a recruiter and want to make us want to read more of your resume. If you have more passive words like participated in, it just doesn't have the same impact. Essentially proactive rather than reactive words can be more attractive. This is again the first look. So we need you to highlight what you've done. This is not the time to be shy. We want to see, we want to talk to you but we need you to give us the information we need to determine if it could be a mutual fit and be able to move forward. All right, final stages here. We are getting into tips and tricks for interviewing at Amazon. So there's two main keys to interviewing with Amazon and it is the leadership principles and the STAR method. So the STAR method is not Amazon specific by any means. It is essentially the industry standard of how to structure interview question responses stands for situation, task, action, result. So Amazon does behavioral interviewing based on the leadership principles. So questions might start, tell me about a time, an example around customer obsession, tell me about a time you went above and beyond to exceed a customer's expectations. So being asked a behavioral question like this, you would outline an example from your own experience using the STAR method. What was the situation that you encountered? What was the task that you either took on yourself or were given? What was the action that you actually took? And then what were the results? We're looking for something measurable, quantifiable here. We need to understand really what you've done previously and if it is repeatable, transferable and scalable if you were to come to Amazon. Having any data metrics, KPIs to go along with your stories is going to be very key. I like to share them throughout the story to demonstrate how I make data-driven decisions, how I use data to influence others, but definitely you wanna have some sort of data as the result to piggyback off of the story that you're sharing and really give it that punch that shows the interviewers what you can do and what you might be able to do if you were to join their team. The leadership principles are the other main key. So next slide here. Obviously all of them are important. That's why we have them. We now have 16 leadership principles, but I've pulled a few key leadership principles that are going to be very important for a product manager or product manager technical role. Ownership, we talked a little bit about this earlier in terms of, we wanna understand what you've owned. Ownership is just very important to be able to have the definition of a product and really drive home and partner with all the different teams you need to be able to for that product and the delivery. You need to have ownership of it. So we don't want people to have to tell you what to do. We want you to be able to take initiative, take ownership of that situation. And Think Big, that is going to come into play, especially in terms of product vision. Amazon does not sacrifice long-term goals for short-term gain. So when we're talking about Think Big, it's in terms of timeline as well as just scope and scale of the product. Dive deep is gonna be essentially key. Generally in interviews, we'll pair dive deep in conjunction with probing on technical depth, but it also just on its own is very important. We want people that are, you know, you might see this in job descriptions. We want people who can and want to roll up their sleeves and really dive in, not just take surface level data or build out surface level solutions. We really want to dive deep into the problem to create a substantial solution. Deliver results. I often will say this one self-explanatory. If all the work you do does not have any results delivered, then that could be a problem, but it is gonna be very key when you're building a product, you need to deliver on that. Ernst Trust is gonna be in very strong conjunction with like stakeholder management. It is essential that you can partner with all these business and tech teams. Okay, so I did get a couple of questions for Q and A. First question, do I need to have a tech background to be a product manager or a product manager technical? You do not. So all of our job descriptions, again, basic qualification, they are going to require a four year degree. It does not necessarily have to be a computer science background. It could be in a variety of categories. The one thing that we're going to be looking at though is what have you learned throughout your career? What skills have you gained that are applicable to product management? And especially if we're looking at a PMT role, have you gained those skills around system design and technology trade-offs that would have you be set up for success if you were to be a PMT? But no, a technical background or degree is not necessary. Next is a product management certificate necessary. It is not. So there are like PMP or product certificates. Definitely the product school and product related certificates can offer a wide variety of education and help you grow your skills. Could also help you assess if product is the direction that you want to go in your career. So it can be helpful for sure, but it's not necessary. And again, we're really looking for the experience. So if you have only done a product certificate and you haven't actually worked as a product manager, then getting into a position where you can gain some real world experience on the job as a product manager is gonna be really key to transitioning into like a product management role at Amazon is startup experience necessary. It's not, Amazon does like to pride itself on just being a gigantic startup. Honestly, the org I support really does have some of that startup feel still despite the size of it. We say it's always day one. So startup experience, at least for Amazon is definitely not mandatory. Thank you so much everybody for joining me today. I hope that the content I shared was informative and insightful and that it will help you moving forward in your careers and applying to jobs and whether it's Amazon or not. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn at any point. I am happy to discuss just anything related to product management and career coaching and if you're interested in Amazon. All right, bye, thank you so much.