Hello from sunny Seattle. I'm Nick, a former Amazon Bar Raiser and today we will talk about
how to get ready for the Marketing functional interview loop at Amazon. I should preface
what I say next by underscoring that the most important part of your interview process would be
the behavioral interview questions. You should get ready for those by studying the Amazon
Leadership Principles, the 16 Leadership Principles, and matching them to your
experiences - both accomplishments and failures. And make sure that
you have good answers prepared that illustrate these Leadership Principles across the board.
We help with that in the different packages that we offer on our site, but
now, without further delay let me jump into
helping along with some thoughts of what you could expect during your Marketing interview.
The Marketing role-playing, functional questions that you're going to hear
would be based on hypothetical scenarios where you'd be asked to imagine how you would resolve
a certain problem. Things like: how would you determine the pricing of a
certain product. How would you determine the strategy, the go-to-market strategy,
when you launch a brand new device or a brand new service to the customer? How would you segment
the audiences that a new product would appeal to? How would you launch a brand new service
in a new Amazon territory, where the service might have been launched in a different country
but now you're launching it in a brand new territory for the very first time.
Don't be afraid to be specific and to come up with very concrete answers. Produce all the
assumptions that you need for your answer on your own. Display what those assumptions are, walk the
interviewer through your thought process and come up with the answer. Now, ask for clarification if
it's helpful to you. Don't overdo it - maybe ask for one or two clarification questions
then after that start producing the assumptions on your own and produce the answer as well.
A couple of key points for the Marketing interview
is that the Amazon culture tends to be very scrappy. It tends to be very frugal. So,
when you come from maybe a more classic type of Marketing culture where you would have access to
a lot of surveys and expert help and consultants, and so on, and so forth.
That might not necessarily be the case at Amazon. That's not to say that Amazon is not going to
give you the resources that you need but they would expect you as a Marketer to come up with
solutions that are more innovative than: I would go to a certain agency XYZ and ask them to solve
the problem for me. Do not come up with these types of answers. Those types of answers might
be considered lazy thinking, conventional type of answers by a lot of your Amazon interviewers.
So, come up with interesting, unproven answers. Do not worry about your answers being 100% correct.
As long as you, again, showcase your logic and display what are the assumptions that
you're making, in order to come up with the specific answer, the interviewer
is going to respect that. And even if you provide a response that is incorrect,
they're going to correct your response. And they're going to engage in a conversation
with you, in order to help push you along down one path or another.
So, again, to recap, focus on your behavioral questions and answers
first and foremost. They're going to comprise the majority of your interview questions during your
interview loop. And, then secondly, when it comes to Marketing functional/role-playing questions,
expect questions along the lines of: how would you price a project, how would you launch a new
service, how would you segment customer segments for a brand new Amazon product, so on and so
forth. Don't worry about being right all the time. Go on a limb. Showcase your responses,
be courageous and bold, and the rest is going to take care of itself.
I hope this helps. Best of luck to you in your Amazon Marketing interview. Bye bye.