Amazon Leadership Principle - Ownership

The Thought - “Leaders are owners. They think long-term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their team. They never say “that’s not my job”.

What is “Ownership” at Amazon

Think like a CEO - For a CEO, there is no work in the organization that is outside of one’s scope of work. Ownership is the key trait an interviewer will look for, in your answers. Amazon ownership principle simply means that every employee at amazon is expected to behave like an owner because it is believed that if you own things then you will fix the issues at root cause level. Amazon leadership principle ownership is going to be one of the default leadership principle at levels of interviews. Also, ownership leadership principle of Amazon is probably the most easiest and straight forward to understand.

Read below to gain more understanding of ownership amazon interview questions.

Ownership Amazon interview questions

• Can you talk about a scenario when you picked up something outside of your scope of work ? Why (to gauge your intent)

• Have you ever transitioned/handover the responsibilities to another person, how did you ensure you are making the person taking over your role succeed ?

• Walk through a scenario when you took the lead to help a struggling peer, why did you think you should help?

• Did you take any tough stance to forego short term or immediate gain to create long term scalable or sustainable results ? If the situation arises again, would you do something differently based on your past learning ?

• Any initiative you took because it benefits the customers or whole organization but wasn’t necessarily impacting your team.

Interviewers expectations from your answers on “Ownership”

• Are you a person willing to share your learning with other teams?

• Are you a person who ensures that acquired knowledge is documented to ensure business continuity?

• Do you think short term stop-gap fixes works best or produce solutions that solves at large scale.

• Are you person who looks to solve for root causes of the issue so that other customers that will not face the same issue.

• Do you understand the impact of your teams work on upstream or downstream processes.

Must have in your answers on “Ownership”

• Owner's mindset - Never say that was not in your scope of work if you could have contributed.

• Always display the intent to solve for root causes not interim solutions.

• Own the mistakes and work on solutions.

• Ensures success of people taking over roles; you still own it even if you have handed it over to another person, when needed.