Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are sceptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.
Dive Deep
Dive Deep is one of the more challenging Amazon leadership principles to talk through in the interview. It’s often easy to think of examples that would “work if I could show them”, especially when talking about a complicated analysis you’ve completed. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that – you won’t have the spreadsheet or code in front of you. So you need to think about how you will explain a complex problem to someone who has no experience of the situation.
Your interviewer will look for a few things when discussing the Dive Deep questions with you. If you’re an individual contributor they’ll want to see if you have a firm grasp of the details in your work, and can you deeply discuss it? The Amazon interviewer will also want to see clear evidence of if you frequently audit your work by checking the facts, accuracy of data and the assumptions you make. This means that you’ll need to:
- Explain the “why” of the problem clearly – why did you decide it was worth spending time going deeper into a problem
- Show the business impact of your Dive Deep in the interview. There’s no point diving really deep into something which you weren’t able to change, or that contributed 0.01% growth for the business. This is tied in to the Deliver Results leadership principle.
- Show what you did that was “above average” – if anyone could have done it (a) why didn’t they and (b) what did you do that was special to generate the insights.
- A super strong answer will also show how you cut through some perceived wisdom which was held by your team/colleagues. Again, if no-one bothered to have a view, the topic probably isn’t important enough
If you’re applying for a Manager level role, you’ll need to demonstrate a few more competencies to give a good Dive Deep answer. To show strength in this Leadership Principle, you’ll need to show how you managed to balance pushing the team for insights and challenging their thinking without skewing into micromanagement. This is a super hard balance to strike, but is something you should be aware of when thinking through your answer preparation.
A Dive Deep Leadership Principle Example Question
This answer uses the STAR format – if you don’t know what the Amazon STAR interview question format is – we’ve also explained that here.
Tell me about a problem you had to solve that required in-depth thought and analysis? How did you know you were focusing on the right things?
Example leadership principle question
The key thing here is to break down the question into its two constituent pieces before you think through how to best answer it. You need to make sure that you have a solid answer on how you know you were focusing on the right things, as well as the interesting thought and analysis you did. If you don’t do this, the answer risks being superficial and falling apart on probing.
There is a very general example answer below. This is not to say “say this in the Amazon Interview” – rather to give you a view of the framework and how you would integrate the interesting analysis you’ve done into the STAR format whilst still hitting some of the criteria for Dive Deep.
Situation: I was working on an interesting problem assessing the profitability of a brand. We were coming up to the negotiation where we had to pitch to them for more money, but we couldn’t come up with a good plan to show how we were going to deliver them incremental growth.
Task: I decided to build a model which would show what would happen if we were not able to agree that they should spend more money on the marketplace.
Action: The model I built took in a number of inputs such as forecasted orders at different levels of profitability, then I ran it a couple of times to make sure that the numbers made sense. At this point I was sure to check my assumptions that the partner would care about increased orders by talking to my counterpart at the partner, who was concerned about losing revenue.
Result: I was able to increase our profitability by XYZ% by showing the partner how their reduced profitability would impact our forward looking orders. They agreed to support us by doing XYZ actions, which led to their full year profitability increasing. Next time I would work with the partner much earlier to understand their full motivations before rushing to build a new solution in a short time frame before the negotiation.