Master 30 Amazon Leadership Principles questions covering Customer Obsession, Ownership, and Dive Deep scenarios.
Question 21 of 30
What You Need to Know
Experienced
Community Answers

Kevin Downey has an extensive background in business management, recruiting, branding and marketing. He's volunteered his career coaching services at job fairs, lecturing on interview techniques and crafting winning resumes and cover letters.
'Dive Deep' is another Amazon Leadership Principle, which states, "Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them." When considering your example, it is okay to offer an instance where you recognized a mistake you made, so long as you also describe the measures you took to remediate your error and how you ensured it never happened again. As Jeff Bezos puts it, "If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle."

Kevin Downey has an extensive background in business management, recruiting, branding and marketing. He's volunteered his career coaching services at job fairs, lecturing on interview techniques and crafting winning resumes and cover letters.
"I was supervising two teams working on different projects. Once I felt that team one was off to a good start, I started developing team two. After performing brief check-ins with team one, I realized I was dedicating too much attention to team two. Team one had finished a draft of their initial report, and I realized their findings were all over the place and didn't line up. I found that two team members were independently producing the same content. I looked back at the initial directive and realized my assistant had created an error by assigning the same tasks to two team members. So I held a brief meeting, gave the whole team a course correction to generate the lost content, and rewrote the initial report. This produced some rework, but we quickly caught up. Once we were back on track, we met our deadlines, and I learned never to take the work of even my highest performers for granted."

Interview Coach
Jaymie
A real coach, not AI. I read every answer myself and write back with personalized feedback.
Typically responds within 24 hours.
0 - Character Count
Prepare for behavioral questions tied to Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles framework.
Get StartedJump to Question

Written by Kevin Downey
30 Questions & Answers • Amazon

By Kevin

By Kevin