what's up everyone kenji here and in this video i thought i'd share a day in the life working
at amazon in business development specifically this is the business development graduate program
and here's the job description so feel free to pause if you want to know the details but
basically the positions aim that recent graduates from university typically in
engineering or business fields and thank you to the daily upside for sponsoring this video
but before we get into a day in the life i do want to give you a bit of background so you can better
understand my role as well as my responsibilities in short within the amazon marketplace that we all
know of there's actually two main ways to sell products the first one is a seller which is also
known as a third party and the second one is a vendor which is known as a first party and to a
consumer it doesn't make a difference right you just see one product on the site and you buy it
but basically a seller is just a third party that sells their goods on amazon and in exchange amazon
takes a commission for hosting the service right on the other hand you have vendors which means
that amazon's actually buying directly off them at wholesale prices so ensure you could call them
suppliers now the reason why i tell you this split is that in my role i was actually only
dealing with vendors so suppliers in other words and would usually be given anywhere from two to
five different vendors depending on how large they are and our role would basically be to manage them
now the accounts are handed are usually in one category right whether that be
sportswear cameraware or gardening the idea is that having all your vendors in
one category is just going to make your job easier and at the same time you're going to
be more valuable to them as for what i mean by managing these vendors this might range from
improving their advertising and their promotion strategy to their logistics to their financials
and so on and so forth ultimately the goal is to make them successful within amazon re now with
that out of the way let's now get into the day in the life i typically wake up at around 8 am and
as i was working from home due to lockdown there was obviously no commute which meant that i could
line a little longer take my time with breakfast brushing my teeth showering and just overall
getting ready as for the dress code well it's a tech company so there's no dress code also all
interactions were through video calls so shorts or jeans would usually do and no i wasn't that guy
only wearing underwear and a t-shirt roughly by 8 45 or 9 i'll be at my desk ready to start the day
to be honest amazon didn't really enforce a schedule instead you work to get things done
right that can be both good and bad they can be good if you're quite productive and you're you
find your tasks relatively easy then you'll be done in a shorter amount of time but at the same
time it can be bad if you're not that productive or you struggle with some of the tasks your day
is going to be considerably longer right but all in all i do think it's a better system
than just sticking around in order to impress your boss that you work very long hours right
so first things first i'll check my calendar for the day basically seeing what meetings i have
then i check my emails there was usually a good 50 or so every morning from all sorts of market
updates most of them frankly just weren't relevant to me but i go through them just in case there's
something i then go on to check the financials of the accounts that i manage so basically i'd
go to a database management tool and put in queries to see if things are looking normal
so i'd look at kpis like growth rates returns margins and so on both for the accounts that i
manage like say garmin and under armour as well as the overall category in this case sportswear
now these weren't actually my accounts i'm just using them as an example for you to understand
better doing that research would then prepare me nicely for my meeting call at 10 a.m with one of
my vendors as i would have all the relevant data in case they wanted to know what the market was
looking like as it was especially uncertain due to lockdown and people obviously behaving differently
to how they might in a normal scenario let me give you an example usually people spend their summers
outdoors but this time around they were buying gym equipment inflatable pools and other things
like that and through my research i'll be able to tell those trends and see what kind of supplies we
currently have and if we had a supply deficit for instance or we were predicted to have one in the
near future i'd basically notify my vendors so they can ramp up production for instance
depending on how big the vendor is i might have a call with the ceo the commercial director or
the amazon account specialist usually arranged from one to three people on the vendor's side
and me on the other side and not gonna lie i thought it was rather daunting at first
to have a couple senior executives in their 50s asking me a 22 23 year old fresh out of college
some questions about what they should do with their account right but luckily i got up to
speed quickly and hopefully i provided some value to them so that call will last around
30 minutes and we discuss all things from purchase orders upcoming promotions maybe even new products
for the season or any other doubts that i might have or they might have as well right
all in all that 30 minute call is going to dictate how the rest of my day is going to look like
from 10 30 on i will write down all the things that have been discussed so i can send them to
my managers so they can be in the loop and also for my vendor and i to hold ourselves accountable
and let's just say that for the purposes of this video there's three main tasks that
the vendor is asking me to do just so i can walk you along number one place an order of
1000 units of smart watches to xyz warehouses number two send a report with the products that
i think should be marketed for an upcoming promotion and lastly send out another report
with all the product pages that need improving so things like having poor images wrong titles
short descriptions or other things like that so like i said earlier i would work on these tasks
throughout the day and depending on how important they are i might finish them in one to three days
but before we continue let me briefly talk to you about the daily upside a free business and
finance newsletter that i've been reading for a few months now they're quite new but they already
have well over 100 000 subscribers and it's for good reason they combine delivering important
news with a bit of humor overall the newsletter is structured with an intro and a morning brief
followed by more detailed content and as you can see they like a good gif here and there and maybe
even crack a joke within the text too i personally enjoy reading them for getting some free quality
insights on business news but i also think it's a great resource for a typical interview question of
tell me about some recent business news where the daily upside will definitely have you covered for
that and if you're wondering how reliable their content is the company was created by a former
investment banker and they now have a team of experts ranging from career journalists to
scholars so if you want to sign up to a daily upside i'll leave a link in the description
all right let's get back to the video so until one i might be working on these tasks some i might
be able to do myself while others i might need to go ask around to the expert in a particular thing
like say the expert in supply chain so let's say that out of these three tasks i'm able to
complete number one the purchase orders which is rather quick and the third one on improving the
product page and while i'm working on these tasks it's not uncommon to get interrupted by colleagues
asking for help or some emails you might need to reply to so once i'm done with these tasks
i'll notify my vendor that they're done and i'm still working on the third one
and if i feel stuck along the way i'll obviously grab a quick snack or maybe take a short break
at one it's lunch time this would just be at home mainly because it was just more convenient and
cheaper also most restaurants were closed so yeah i'd say around 30 minutes was the normal
lunch time so back to work and let's say that from 1 30 to 2 30 there's a training course for using a
specific platform so there's people live from all over the world and there's one instructor who's
usually an amazon employee that's a couple years in teaching us how to use the platform and these
platforms might be things like internal tools to analyze data to outsource tasks to a support team
or to raise errors internally so basically the first 30 minutes would be theory basically just
listening to the instructor followed by a 30-minute project or a case study where we
needed to submit it by the end of the hour then after a course let's say that i get an urgent
email from one of my vendors basically saying that one of the images that they uploaded isn't
uploading correctly could you please check that so for the next hour i'll check what's going on
see if i can fix a problem myself if not i would escalate it to the right team and let's say that
hopefully i can solve the issue in an hour and i can give the good news to the vendor between 330
and 4 if i'm not feeling very productive i'm just going to chill on the sofa on my phone maybe read
something until i get re-energized to get back into it and like i said earlier it's about getting
your job done and not so much about spending x number of hours in front of the computer right
between 4 and 4 30 i might have a coffee chat with my manager we aim to have around two
coffee chats a week just to see where things are at see if i'm doing all right basically
also because we weren't allowed in the office it was a good way to socialize with my boss
i'd usually just use this time to ask specific questions and things i wasn't sure how to do so
for instance how do i go about selecting products for a promotion sometimes my boss would be able to
answer them while other times he would just refer me to someone else and let's say that for this one
my boss refers me to a colleague who's actually the expert in promotions so i quickly jump on a
30-minute call now that they're available so i'd lay out my task and he would walk me through how
to tackle it basically he would give me all the information i needed to filter the right products
for example what are the requirements for a promotion how much should be invested and so on
so with that information noted i would then get started on preparing the report so let's start
doing some queries on the database management tool to filter by all the requirements i've been given
and let's say i get a total of 10 products to promote and then prepare a budget for me to share
with the vendor as well as make the information visually pleasing for them to understand better
once i have all that i would summarize it in an email and send it out to the vendor
and let's say that the whole process would take me around 2 hours so from 5 to 7 pm
and then for the next hour so i might do more admin tasks so things like replying
to emails to chat messages as well as setting up future meetings with clients or with my manager
and yeah just overall preparing things for the next days right
at around 8pm i would wrap things up and go for a walk or run outside just to get some fresh air
and let's say that would take around one hour and then i'd go home to have dinner
after dinner i usually didn't have to work anymore maybe once every two week i had to do something
but that usually wasn't the norm so on a typical day i would either chill by reading watching some
youtube or even working on some personal projects like video editing photography or writing so
that's a typical day in the life do take it as a bit of a rough guide because days obviously vary
but on a weekly level i didn't work on weekends and most weekdays were around 11 hours so that
would be around a 55 hour work week on fridays i would be out around one hour before so say around
7 pm so that's the video i also made another day in the life while working at goldman sachs as an
investment monkey intern if you want to check that out i'll leave it in the description and lastly
do let me know if you want me to make more day in the live videos of some of my colleagues that
work at other companies like say google jpmorgan or tesla which might be of interest to you let
me know in the comments yeah so that's all for this one i'll hopefully catch you in the next one