I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Feb 2014
Interview
Contacted by Hiring Manager. First Round: 2 phone Interviews.
1 I : Behavioral, Resume based. Challenging Situation, what did you do? What Metrics did you follow?
2 I : Case on pricing an Amazon product. Questions on what additional features can you provide in that product. Some behavioral questions on resume. Why Amazon?
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What metrics did you follow in that challenging situation?
I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2013
Interview
Was in b-school in 2nd year and applied online for RLDP in end of Nov. Shortlisted for 2 phone screens mid-Dec. Then called for four back to back, 1-hr on-site interviews in Seattle in Jan. After that they felt i was a better fit for a Sr.Product Manager role so had 2 more phone screen by PMs.
The format of questions across all 8 interviews was similar, behavioral questions around leadership principles of Amazon and one business questions. Last 5 mins, you can ask them your Qs. Questions include -
-Tell me about a time when you had to use your judgement to take a decision
-Tell me about a time when you had to dig really deep into data to get insights
-You are a vendor manager and you have an opportunity to buy a huge volume of a product at a very low cost. What will you do.
-You are PM on Prime and you decide to drop / increase the price of Prime membership. How will you evaluate its impact on demand
-Pick a project you want to talk about / you're proud of
-Tell me about a time when you had to go above and beyond for your project
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
None really. As long as you have a story for each of the leadership principles, you will be OK
The process was thorough although for a Product Role I was expecting a lot of questions around the product and what I would do with a product for the role I was interviewing for. However, what I encountered was multiple interviews where almost everyone asked me the same questions just in a different way. One of the interviewers actually told me he was reading off the interview question sheet - I thought that was strange as the company I am at now, if we interview for product roles we want to know how product plans, roadmaps, strategies, analytics, etc... have been done in the past and we are interested in the tangible products the candidate has created.
The interviewers were obviously a smart team and had good questions about numbers and a lot of questions about statistical decision making - which is fine - maybe the product I was applying for was an analytics tool instead of what I thought it was :)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Name a time you made a big decision based on metrics - was an odd question to me - I don't just use metrics to make decisions, the metrics guide people to look deeper into the area, not jump to decisions. My opinion!