BEHIND-THE-SCENES at Amazon: ex CTO's insights on culture, interview process, strategy, etc.

You don't get that many opportunities in your career to do that. — This is Jay Sharma. Jay used to serve as Amazon CTO in Canada where he led engineering, product and program management. I interviewed him for the stories behind his career. — I was uh coming off of a uh failed startup uh that I was part of during pandemic. — I asked Jay about how he got his CTO job at Amazon, what his interviews were like, how he prepared for them and how he took ownership of his new role. Nobody is going to sell your skills better than you can. — I also enjoy talking to Jay about promotions, driving your own career, and building trust. — The underlying thing here is trust takes time to build. A lot of people expect trust overnight, doesn't — but trust can be lost overnight. — Today, Jay is a coach on I got an offer. If you enjoy this conversation and need support with your career, you can grab some one-on-one coaching time directly with Jay on our website. Click the link in our description. Now, here's the full episode. — So, do you want to tell me like the

story of how you got that job? So, maybe we can start with how you first, you know, got the opportunity to interview for that role. — Amazon is an interesting place. I was reached out by the recruiter for a role at Amazon and um even though the role says CTO uh technically Amazon only has one CTO u but the responsibility of this role is was the entire Amazon Canada marketplace like from the homepage to the actual delivery. So entire tech funnel was under the purview of this role. — Okay. and only thing that was not in purview was the actual warehouse management, the inventory placement and whatnot. Those were uh taken care by other teams. Now that said, what was super interesting about this role was Amazon Canada did not have a tech team before. — Okay, — they had a sort of a program team, program manager team that used to work with the central Amazon US teams to get the features prioritized for the US. And we know how a story usually goes uh where you know whenever the competition is between us and any other marketplace US tends to win because of the size and things were continuously getting dep prioritized and whatnot. So this opportunity was to actually rebuild the team ground up and the most exciting thing for me was you don't get an opportunity to build a team from zero and grow it to whatever the team size you need to go to 10 20 50 100 right what wherever you need to go to you don't get that many opportunities in your career to do that you can inherit teams but building a team from ground up is a very different and very fulfilling experience so that was the most important thing that I thought I would uh like I would get from this and the only other time I got to do this was when I was ran my own startup many months ago. Right. — So that was the main lucrative point. — And was that a cold outreach or did you have any connection to that person? — It was uh sort of a cold outreach from Amazon but you know um Amazon at least uh back in the day uh recruiters would keep reaching out to you uh if your profile is good for one or the other role. um like I interviewed for a different role when this then this role came along uh you know I finally picked up this role over the other one. — So is it fair to say that this was close to a general management role despite the kind of like chief technology officer title? — Um you can say that but not in specific Amazon term because Amazon term GM has lot more responsibilities like I reported to the GM. — Okay. — Right. like they had the P& L responsibility. They are responsible for the entire the product movement, the actual physical product movement, — right? — Uh where I was only responsible for the tech parts of it, make sure that everything moves in the tech. — Okay. So kind of like a tech GM role. Okay, that makes sense. And so you got the outreach, you got pretty excited because as you said, you know, opportunities to go from zero to a large headcount at very big companies are aren't very common, right? Um and so I guess what was your initial reaction?

Did you jump on the opportunity? What did you do from there? — Amazon was definitely exciting and uh I was also going through a turning point in my career uh where I was uh coming off of a uh failed startup uh that I was part of during pandemic. — Okay. So I was looking for something and Amazon was always on my radar primarily because the scale that Amazon provides. Not many company in the world can provide you that. — Yeah. — Like I had worked for Microsoft before. likes of PayPal and Bloomberg before but I had not worked for Amazon. So I was like hey Amazon bring gives me a scale uh exposure that no other company can. And when Amazon came uh knocking I was like this is a no-brainer and I need to at least try my luck. And everything kind of worked out from there. — Cool. Okay. So can you tell us that you know the story of how you went about getting that role — as an candidate? What becomes more

important is delivering your answers in a very structured STAR format is that is very you know well-known uh like situation task action result which is easy to comprehend uh hits on the points of what the interviewer is looking for and don't you know generate fl like Amazon doesn't like fluff at all. Right. like never say like you know results are great always you know quantify the impact so that that's essentially the recipe so in my interview loop was exactly similar to anybody else's like if you're interviewing for L5 or L6 L7 L8 are very similar as well only thing is you need you should be able to demonstrate what when you were making those decisions had a larger impact and it was not a silo impact and a small bug that you were working on — right and so can you tell us more about how you went about articulating that

impact. — So um I actually did quite a bit of homework before. Okay. — So what I did was I sat down and kind of uh listed down what I had done in last 5 to seven years. Okay. I didn't go anything before that because that is usually not very relevant and list down okay I was in this company in this role these were my projects what were the interesting things and kind of jotted the notes down — and then I tried to what I did was I kind of created a spreadsheet where I had a leadership principle you know kind of description of what this leadership principle is trying to uh address and then out of these things that I've done I tried to create stories that map to these leadership principles and for every leadership principle I had two stories prepared in the explicit star format. When I was working at this company, I had this problem. — Yeah. — Right. Which created these issues. I took these actions and the issue was resolved and we were finally able to get what we wanted to achieve and those you know impacts were if we trying to drive revenue higher, if you're trying to drive profitability, customer engagement, whatever the measure might be, but quantify it, — right? So I spent almost two weeks in kind of preparing my story bank and once you had the story bank then it becomes very easy because what when somebody asks you a question you just have to think about what are they trying to get and then you can pick up a story from your story bank and kind of relay that and since you have done all the hard work you have all the depth all the you know uh that the interviewer want to go and like if asks five follow-up questions because you have done this work you can answer those questions. — Yeah. Did you ever have — don't make laugh — right that makes sense during the interviews did you ever have any doubts about you know what leadership principle they were the interviewer was trying to get at — you do um like you know there is like from one question I could be coming at it many different ways many different things right so the best you can do is take a moment think about the question and trying to you know map it to your leadership principle understanding what is the most likely thing that they're trying to get at — because if they're not trying to get at that get at the thing that you know kind of interpret in a follow-up question they'll give you another hint. — Okay. — Right. So for example let's say you know somebody asks you a question you know tell me about when you were dealing with a difficult customer. Right now they could be looking at customer obsession. — disagree and comet they could be looking at earn trust. You don't know but when you start giving answers their follow-up will give you hints on okay no you say you were addressing customer obsession but other person was looking for earn trust they will like say but how did the customer believe you right — like how did you make sure the customer is not agitated they don't leave you know your product and what not so that gives you an idea oh this is not less about customer obsession now this is more going in the direction of earns trust — that makes sense so you start with your best guess and then based on follow-up questions you course correct right and correct — but stick on the story Don't shift the story and that's the reason having depth on story is is useful because lot of these stories can be applied to multiple leadership principles. — Yeah. Cool. That's amazing. You know who were you interviewing with? Was it

people you later worked with or what was the interview panel like? — Some people uh in the panel uh was were the people that I actually ended up working with. But usually the way Amazon conducts their interviews and conduct their panels is it's a lot more about the seniority of the level you're interviewing for. Let's say you assume you are interviewing for L7 role. — Yeah. — Every interviewer has to be L7 or higher. — Yeah. — Like L6 cannot interview L7. — Okay. — And there is this concept of bar raiser in Amazon. — Yeah. — Usually this is the person you most likely will never work with. Right. This person comes from a completely different org. Amazon also has this bar raiser program. So they have to be have to gone through the entire training uh and then certified as a bar raiser. Their sole job is to make sure that this new hire if they come into Amazon they will raise the bar. They are better than 50% of the people at that level today. So a lot of time what you find is people that you interview with maybe one or two people are the ones from the actual team that you end up working with. A lot of them are from the sister teams and there is one person who has nothing in common and when you see that you know that person is bar raiser and usually bar raisers come with a second uh person in the interview that's a bar raiser in training. — Okay. — Right. Uh they call it Brit. The idea here is this person most likely will drive the interview and bar raiser will be observing. — Okay. right? Because they want to train bar raisers, you know, u by throwing them on the deep end while somebody is observing and they'll jump in if if the bar raiser is missing or the Brit is missing something and whatnot. But that that's how you know who's bar raiser and bar raiser interview is one of the most important interview, — right, — in the entire interview loop. — That's great. Yeah, I often get questions from people, you know, wondering how to spot the bar raiser in their loop and yeah, the two points you made sense. So they're often, you know, from a part of Amazon that's unrelated to where you're interviewing for. And as you it's really interesting what you said around, you know, having a second person in the interview who's uh who's being trained to become a bar raiser. I hadn't heard that before. So that that's really interesting. — I know this because I went through the Brit program myself, — right? — And then right before I so I completed the Brit program, but right before I was about to get certified, I decided to leave Amazon. — Okay. Uh so I did not get the certified bar razor but I went through the entire rigor so I know how the process works. — That makes sense. And so if you think back to that time like how did um how did you feel like throughout that process? What was kind of like exciting? What was stressful? What are your memories of that process — for the bar interview process or the entire job? — The entire job one — I think it was mixed bag on many different levels. — Okay. There were definitely exciting things where you had all of all these exciting problems that you need to solve while you are ramping up the team on the side. But it also was very stressful. Like remember that this is like 2021, — right? — When the software job market was crazy. — Every person who you interviewed had usually four, five, six offers. — Right. So you will spend a ton of amount and energy in finding the right person and then person will not show up because they found a better offer and you know uh so like a lot of those things will frustrate you as a person who's trying to build the team because you don't want to lower the bar and bring anybody in — right — and you can't control the you can't blindly throw money like there are definitely guardrails in terms of what you can and you cannot do at a company level but still you are managing a budget, you don't want to throw a ton of money just trying to get a person in. So, finding the right balance was uh challenging. What helped during that time was because everybody was remote, we were able to pick remote people, you know, to do fill those things. I also kind of you know took decisions to kind of uh build part of team in India because getting talent there was easier versus getting in Seattle because in Seattle you're competing with all the fangs, — right? And anybody who is good and you like is usually liked by other fangs too. And then it becomes a comp battle which usually Amazon ends up losing. Amazon is not the best pay master. I'll be very honest. Like from my experience again this is not an official word but from my experience when I have seen the offers that people revealed when we were extending an offer or my research I've seen Amazon is not the best pay master especially when it comes to Meta or Google. — And what about your process for the CTO role? what was kind of like exciting there or what was stressful your memories there. — Yeah. So I think it was very exciting in the sense I was doing these things at Amazon scale for the first time. I was you know um I was spending so much time talking to people that in my previous role would I would have never talked to. For example, I was spending a bunch of time talking to people who manages manage the warehouses, people who uh manage the inventory, you know the deals come when come the prime day or Black Friday sale or whatnot, right? How do these people think? How does that fit into the entire business cycle or the business process? It was very exciting. This was also a time where uh like before this I've primarily worked in places where the product was digital that you were selling. Here you were actually selling physical product. — So this concept that I learned from Amazon was the idea of customer promise. So for example when you go to Amazon and make a purchase Amazon says if you buy in next n hours and minutes it will arrive to you by this time. — Right. — That's a customer promise. — Yeah. I never thought of it like that and whenever Amazon fails to meet that we track it we do sit down and then say okay know what the hell is going on why are we missing it so many times there are strong SLOs's around those things so those are the kind of things that I learned that I've never learned before because in software selling that was never an issue like you could just download the complete the purchase or whatnot but in this case it was very different so that gave me a perspective that I never had before so that was very exciting from that standpoint. The other interesting thing was working with so many smart and intelligent people that from all different walks of life like for example in my previous role when I'm sitting I'll be sitting with all tech or product leaders — right — here I'll be sitting with the sales people marketing people you know inventory management experts supply chain experts and we are trying to solve the problem okay prime day is coming for this we need to plan like these are the products are going to go on sale. This is the potential demand for each based on the zip code level. How are we going to position this? How will the tech stand behind it? How will we create a war room to make sure nothing breaks? You don't want your site to be done when the two days of prime day is going on. So, a lot of those things which I had never done before. That was like mind-blowing experience. Very challenging as well, I would say. — Great. So, can you give us the landscape

a little bit in simple terms in terms of uh what did your team do? Who was reporting to you? who you were reporting to. You mentioned you were reporting to the Canada GM I think. — Yeah. So I was give us the landscape. Yeah. — I was reporting to the GM of Canada. What my team did was so we did multiple things but the first thing that we started with was bridging the gap between where Amazon Canada marketplace was and where US was. So usually what happens is US is on the frontier. They're always pushing the frontier launching new stuff, new features, new things. To give you a perspective, when I uh was at Amazon Canada in the US, I personally was seeing subs same day deliveries like I could order something in the morning and have it delivered by afternoon. Okay, — Canada was still stuck by 2day. — Okay. — So, bridging those gaps like going from two day to one day to subs same day especially during pandemic makes a lot of sense. — Okay. — Similarly, you know, bringing installments to Canada, right? especially for things like consumer electronics because what we were seeing uh during that time and I think it's even more you know profound now there was a large spike in installment payments — especially when it comes to consumer electronics like people were buying phones on installments people were buying TVs on installment and Amazon did not have that especially Amazon Canada when Amazon had Amazon payments as well so it was just connecting the dots and kind of building those bridges and and enabling those capabilities for Canadian customers. Uh last but not the least, uh that was a very challenging project uh to tell you the truth was Canada is a bilingual

marketplace, — right? — Not many people realize that, but Canada actually has 25% of population that speaks French, — right? — This is uh the population that lives in Quebec. and Quebec authorities came up with regulations and they said if your product packaging marketing material or any you know manuals that come with product are not bilingual there could be heavy penalties. — Is that a recent regulation or has that been — this was this came out when the time I was there. So we I along with my team we built a ton of tooling to help uh kind of bridge that gap. Now think about this for a minute like why is this a problem? Yeah, — majority of the sellers on Amazon, like I guess you're sitting in Europe, right? — I'm actually in France. So there you go. — France. So tomorrow, if you want to sell to Amazon, especially Canada, you could start shipping products from France as long as logistically and economically it makes sense for you to ship packages from France to Canada, you can do it. And that's what we see. There are a lot of people sitting in China and other parts of the world who are shipping packages across the world. — Right? — These people, they're not aware of the laws. And even if they were, they probably don't have access to French capabilities, — right? — So we had to build lot of tooling to actually enable that. The first thing we did was revamp the site. So we brought in lot of translation using bunch of AI tools, a lot of them from uh AWS to you know kind of translate all the English material on the website including the product manuals that were uploaded and create French copies of that. — Okay. doing it at scale with high accuracy is not easy. Then we had to create tools for these suppliers like how can you change your product packaging because what you don't want is somebody ships a package from China and it that reaches a customer in Quebec and that person takes the picture and sends to the authorities and — right — Amazon gets in trouble — right — so we had to build lot of guard rails and and checking tools audit tools in our warehouses like when the packages are being processed they should be able to flag oh this package doesn't looks like bilingual Okay. — Right. A man human audit is required. So building all those tools in a compressed timeline was a big challenge, but that was a great accomplishment as well. — That's awesome. Okay. So it sounds like you focused on one hand kind of like catching up with US standards in terms of delivery time and overall user experience but also getting compliant with that uh Canadian regulation right of having things in — a lot of time. Yeah. So a lot of time what happens is especially when people think of Canada as little sister of US — right — they forget that uh marketplaces have subtle differences but those subtle differences when piled on top of each other the difference becomes very big — they add up. Yeah that makes sense. And so who did you have in your team to help you make that happen? I guess you had a head of product a head of engineering. — Yep. So I I had u you know multiple product managers uh a product leader uh as well as uh I had a you know multiple engineering managers and then they had uh their uh engineering team. So like in Amazon terminology SDS SD12 and senior SDS. — Yeah. — And and then we had a couple of program managers to help uh coordinate with uh other teams. For example, even though Amazon Canada is a separate marketplace, a lot of the systems we use are still the central Amazon systems. So whenever we are making Canada specific changes, we have to work with those teams. You know, make sure we are not breaking anything for them and they are okay with the changes that we are making because at the end of the they are the ones who are going to maintain the systems going forward. — That makes sense. It's kind of like a mix of product management, engineering, and program to um coordinate with the rest of the company. Okay. — And so if you think back to, you know, when that recruiter reached out to you about that role like I guess you came into the role with some expectations, right? How was reality different from what you expected?

— I think um I remember initially said it was a mixed bag in many different ways. One of the way was when I walked in, I expected the product team to be the product team that existed to be super strong. — Right. And I I'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus, so I'm not going to name any names or anything of that sort, but it was like it was very evident to me very fast that team is less a product team, more of a program team. And rightfully so because the model that they operated in the past — right — that required program managers more than product managers because a lot more about coordination and persuasion than actually thinking about the solutions and working with the tech teams and actually building those solutions. So I had to actually change lot of that and establish processes around how with the tech team how the new product managers the mostly or more the PMTs in Amazon uh terminology how are they going to work with them with our own SD teams to build the solutions. So that was a big I wouldn't say complete misalignment — but little bit of a unexpected reality that hit me and I had to course correct and kind of rethink the whole thing. Okay. Interesting. And so how did you go about helping the team make that transition? — I think those transitions are hard. I would not go into the nitty know nitty-gritty details because that might ruffle some feathers on the on this. But in essentially in essence you can say you know we had to revamp the team and sort of rebuild a lot of — that makes sense. And um one thing I'm interested in right is that you know this is obviously like a large scope a stressful role. So can you, you know, walk us through the dayto-day? What, what does a day in your life as a CTO of Amazon Canada look like? What's a typical day? — I think like any other Amazon role, the typical day starts with uh monitoring the metrics, right? So we

have our dashboards. We'll start your day first thing in the morning. You'll, you know, open up the dashboard, see everything is going on as expected. If there are any spikes, you know what what's going on and you need to do a follow-up on that. You'll catch up in your emails, then you have you'll have your meetings. The most important thing that I enjoyed at Amazon, which kind of had bit of which added kind of bit of structure was this concept of WBR and MBR. So, weekly business reviews and monthly business reviews. — Okay. — Right. And since we were building the team, uh, we rebranded it as WTRs and MTRS like weekly tech review and monthly tech review. Okay. — We wanted to make sure we are establishing the right tech processes. — Okay. And what that allowed was so this was a meeting that will happen every Tuesday. — Okay, — like Tuesday morning I think it was 9:30 or 10 something around that time uh Pacific time. We'll basically sit down and then look at our our tech processes and you know um how is our velocity looking? How many you know how does our bug pipeline looking? There is this concept of I think it's on call or there was I think there definitely on call. I think there was a specific name for that. uh I'm forgetting that name but that person will come up with their own uh report of this is what I did in the last one week. These were the bugs that I' that were reported or I found and this is how I fixed it. This is what it looks like. This is what's going to go as a handover and what not. Uh in addition, it also gave us time to look at how are our products projects kind of progressing at a weekly cadence, right? So I didn't have to go and attend anybody's sprints like I could look at the dashboards and I can attend this one meeting and read that report that it's written and I get a full picture of how are we progressing what projects are at what stage what projects are progressing fine what requires my attention what requires an escalation with somebody right and then we have a mtr in this we will bring the GM as well and we kind of uh show them where you know how we are progressing as an org at a monthly cadence. So that kind of structure gave a you know it made the role much easier. — Okay. — Right. — It sounds like you relied on yeah metrics and dashboards to run the team. Is that something you brought in or is that something that's kind of like quite consistent across uh — it it's very consistent across uh Amazon you know Amazon. So I don't know if you how much you know about it. Amazon does not use PowerPoint. They use a lot

of Word doc and PDFs. So every meeting starts with a doc. — Yeah. — And every meeting has a reserved time slot like first few minutes like if it's a 60-minute meeting they'll give first 10 15 minutes to read and 45 minutes for discussion. — Okay. — And if it's a 30 minute meeting it will be like 5 to 7 minutes to read and then the discussion depending on if you have a one page two-page doc or a six-page doc. — Yeah. So that culture was new to me but that culture is very prevalent in Amazon and after living that life for 3 years I can vouch that it eases so much of discussion because that talk brings everybody at the same starting point. — Right. It doesn't expect somebody has done some pre-eread and had some conversations which you know brings people at different levels when everybody starts with the doc and after you finish reading the doc everybody has similar understanding and then you can do a more meaningful discussion and less about let's set up another meeting for a meeting — and the metrics and I guess dashboard that you talked about are they part of these documents? — Uh there are definitely uh you know screenshots or you know numbers that will pop up in the document. So the idea is every doc in Amazon is supposed to stand on its own. — Right? — What does it mean is the doc should not assume anything that the reader know already knows other than they can read English. — Okay. — Right. If you introduce a you know a abbreviation for the first time you are supposed to expand on that in the talk itself. — Right? — Right. Give a oneliner what does this mean? Right. If you're talking about numbers, it should add a claim and then it should link to other sources where if somebody's reading, they can go and actually verify that as well. So it's like it's not like, oh, I think the number is 90 million today. I threw it like 90 million needs to be backed by evidence. So like that writing style takes care of lot of things, — right? Sounds like that's something you really enjoyed about. — Yeah, it definitely improves your writing. — Yeah, definitely does. Are there other things that um that you've seen there about Amazon's culture that um that you think you know you would have liked to implement later on in the other at the other places you worked at? Definitely there are the few things that I have uh tried to push uh you know even when I moved to indeed and now um you know um when I'm trying to set up my own startup right few things and

it all boils down to the leadership principles of Amazon — right — I definitely like the bias for action like — okay — enough of talking we should do this we should do that let's do it — right marry this bias for action with failing fast — okay — right instead of debating something for two weeks. Can you spend two hours testing this out and validate it? Especially in the world of AI today, it is possible in most cases. So that's one I definitely bring. Um the second I definitely bring is have backbone disagree and commit like I do not like to surround myself with yes men or yes women. — Right. I want people who can tell me when I'm wrong and they should not be scared about that. Right. doesn't matter where I sit in hierarchy and they sit in hierarchy or you know uh and likewise like I would not want to work in a in an environment where uh people look for me to be a yes man right I would tell them when I think it's not right but after that if they have the authority they are the single decision maker and they say no this is the way we are moving forward I hear you but this is how we're going to move forward then I'm not going to say you know what oh you know and if that doesn't work for an example I'm not going to go and say I told So this is not going to work. I voiced my opinion. You heard it. We document it. If you still want to move this way forward, I'm still going to give my 100%. And I will own whatever the outcome is. That's the essence of have backbone disagree and commit. People usually just get stuck on I disagreed and I had I showed backbone. They forget the committing part. So that's another thing that I like about Amazon. And definitely the writing. I've worked in many companies where I've seen lot of fluffy handwavy PowerPoint decks. — Right. Yeah. — Right. You look at them and you're like, "Oh, this all looks very exciting, but how are we going to do it? " Like, "What next? " Nobody has any idea. — Right. Without naming companies, I' I've seen this so many times in my career that I have lost complete uh you know, trust in them. — That makes sense. And so those leadership principles that you mentioned kind of like have backbone disagree and commit are those the ones you liked kind of like testing candidates on when you were building your team interviewing for your team — anybody who's interviewing at Amazon

would definitely get tested for 8 to 10 leadership principles — right — easily right — now uh for example if you are interviewing for an IC role the hiring manager will make a decision and say oh um this person doesn't is because this person is mate uh hiring managers so they don't need to worry about uh raising the bar or got I think it was there was one leadership principle around hiring like hire the best or something like that — okay — this doesn't apply to this role so I'm going to skip evaluating this candidate on that but majority of them will be interviewed on bias for action customer obsession have backbone earn trust because in Amazon you're not going to work in a silo you could be a great software engineer but a awful collaborator you're not going to succeed. — Mhm. — So majority of the people will get evaluated on 8 to 10 leadership principles to say do that at least. But the most important thing is in Amazon when like people are observing you and evaluating you on leadership principles when they're observing you work on a day-to-day basis too. — Mhm. — Right. For example, let's say Max and Jay are in a meeting and you know Jay says something and Max voices out his disagreement and then walks away. People will notice max disagreed but did not commit. — Okay. — And it will come back at you when the feedback time comes every 6 months or like some people will also proactively give you this feedback but it will definitely come back in 6 months. — Okay. — So people are evaluating everybody on that front too. — One of the things I wanted to ask you

about as well is um is promotions right. You've been you know like promoted many times in your career. How did you go about that? you know a lot of people like try to step up at some point in their career try to level up and get stuck. So what's made you successful at that? — My take is somewhat contrarian on promotions. — Okay. — A lot of people make promotions as a goal. — Okay. — I say promotion are a side effect. — Okay. — And the reason I say that is you don't get promoted on potential, you get promoted on results. Start operating at the next level. You don't need permissions to operate at next level. M — start taking ownership of the tasks and the projects that require the next level. — Okay. — And when you deliver on those results will speak for you. You are growing already and as you grow a side effect is promotions happen. — Okay. — Like a lot of people say hey I have the potential. I can take on this. Why are you not promoting me? — Mhm. — I would flip the thing. If you believe you can do it, start doing it. Show you can do it. Like showell. We keep tell we tell the kids this from a very young a young age like don't tell me you're going to do this show — okay — so why you expect something different when you go to a corporate world or your employment right — okay — show us you can do it and once you start showing it consistently promotions will happen — okay so it's kind of like a focus on what you control philosophy a little bit right of like do the best job you can do act as if you own the next level and good things will follow — yeah And to you know to give you a more precise answer you know the people that I I mentor and coach I always tell them getting promoted is not growth — right — promotion happens because of your growth. Promotions are usually a lagging indicator or lagging signal — right — uh of your growth. You have grown it is demonstrable. People are observing it. Now they just validate that or they know they move that metric. Okay you know what now you we should just promote you to the next level. Right. And in Amazon like to be very honest uh like I've done plenty of promotions and I've reviewed 40 50 promo docs at least if not more. So every promotion in micro in Amazon

requires a promo doc that is usually written by the manager of that person — okay — or the promo candidate and in this they need to provide evidence of their contributions that basically show this person is operating at the next level — okay — and then usually there is a promo review where a group a panel of people will read this promo doc again in Amazon style they'll read the promo doc and then they'll talk about this then they will ask like if People have questions like for example you read the doc and you are not sure if the complexity is at the level at the next level or not. So you might ask follow-up questions and the hiring manager or the man not hiring man the manager would provide more evidence and then people will vote and if and I have seen promos getting rejected for multiple reasons. One sometimes the work that is demonstrated is not at the next level. — Okay. — Sometimes even at the quality of the doc which is mostly on the manager. So I hear I tell people especially people that I coach at working at Amazon, you should write your promo doc. Take ownership of that. You know your work better than anybody else. Work with your manager. Tell them you know once you agree that you know you he's he or she is willing to put you for a promo in the next cycle, you start writing the first draft. — Yeah. — You give them that ammunition so they can actually polish it and kind of prepare it. — That makes sense. Yeah. And it's, you know, it ties in with what you said about, you know, showing that you can operate at the next level, right? Which is do your manager's job, right? And uh make their life easy. — The other thing I say is um Max, nobody in the world knows what you do better than you yourself, — right? — And the second aspect of it, nobody is going to sell your skills better than you can. You need to come into the driver's seat of your own career. You decide the goal and then you drive towards that. A lot of people leave it on, oh my manager is not putting me for promo. What have you done towards that? — Right. That makes sense. And um one question I had for you as well was presenting to execs to CTOs to CEOs is stressful and as a CTO you've had, you know, people present to you or I guess in Amazon's context build documents for you. What tips do you have

for people who have to present to CTOs in their jobs? I think again I will tie it back to Amazon leadership principles. — Okay, — like if you really think about leadership principles individually they might sit at know against each other, right? Earn trust versus have backbone and disagree and commit. — Mhm. — Earn trust basically I should get on your good side so you trust me but on the other side I need to disagree with you when I don't buy into the same idea. — Mhm. — But when you look at the holistic thing it becomes a full story. they are on purpose attention with each other. So when you're presenting to anybody for that matter, titles don't matter. — You need to focus on a few things. The first thing is they need to trust you. The trust comes from a well-written document. — Okay? — And every data should have an evidence. Like every claim There should not be any false claim. — Okay? — The second aspect of building trust comes you make the other people heard. Listen to them carefully. — Okay. and then try to address their concerns. The third thing there is you deliver on your commitments on time. If you say you're going to do something by next week, — okay, — you actually do it or if you can't do it, let the other person know as soon as possible and give them a new timeline. I kid you not, I have heard this so many times in lot of these review meetings. Oh, we don't have this right now. We'll get back to you. And nobody gets back to you, — right? There is not no faster way to lose trust than doing making this mistake. Close the loop. If you said you're going to do something, do something. Hey, you asked me this data in this meeting. I did not have it, but I you know here is I'm sending you this data in an email. Maybe one or two days later. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions. If not there in the next review meeting, have a section where you say these were the open questions from the last time. Here are the answers to those. If there are no further questions here, we can move to the current review. Close the loop. Don't leave people hanging. — Cool. That's amazing advice. So, yeah, it's a lot about building trust, right? Through, you know, backing up what you say with data, saying, you know, doing what you said you were going to do. That's really interesting. — See, the trust goes in multiple dimensions here, you know, and then I can talk a lot about trust. Uh, if people are interested, trust goes two ways. People get promoted, people get given more complex, more ambiguous projects. people given get given high visibility work because managers trust their employees. — Yeah. — If you get a new person on your team, you're not going to give them the most important project that has a uh seuite eyes on it to a brand new person because the trust isn't there. — Right? — The underlying thing here is trust takes time to build. A lot of people expect trust overnight. Doesn't happen. But trust can be lost overnight. — Right? Building trust takes time but can be lost in a snap. So keep an eye on this and it's okay like when you walk in new people don't trust you and that's all right. You don't trust anybody too. — Mhm. — Give it 90day. That's the reason the 90-day thing exists. You know when you come anywhere new 90-day things exist for the exact same reason. You not only need to understand the systems you're going to work on you also need to understand the org the culture the people and build a rapport with them. — That's interesting. Does that point around trust influenced how you were kind of like recruiting for more senior position in your team? Does that mean you're more likely to promote internally rather than hire externally for important roles because you know you already have built trust with people internally? — That definitely happens everywhere. For example, uh like before we talk about what what I have done, let's see what happens in the industry. When a senior leader goes somewhere, the first thing you see is some of their trusted leaders from their previous organization — start moving into the new organization — because every captain need their trusted lieutenants. — Right. A new captain can't go on one day and then have the whole army steer in a different direction. Can't do that. You need your lieutenants. — That's exactly how it works. So if you everybody does that. I've done it, — right? — And I'll continue to do it. Like if I go somewhere I have my people like I I'm building something new or I'm steering a ship and especially when the time is of an essence right if I have 90 days to turn something around and I'm I've walked in on day one I can't control a or of 200 people 500 people uh and convince them to move in a different direction but maybe if I bring in 10 people that I trust they individually can go after 15 20 people each — right — or they can bring their own trusted leader so it happens all the time. So definitely if if there is a person uh who you trust and there is an opportunity and this person is ready not saying you trust somebody and you just put them in a random role if they if the ability and capability aligns with opportunity and trust is there that's the strongest thing right — at least in my mind. — Yeah. No, that makes sense. And so in your CTO role like how much of your time was spent on product versus

engineering? because I want to talk to you about product a little bit. — In this role, a lot of time was spent on engineering. — Okay. — Uh reason being this was a new team, right? And a lot of the work that we were uh doing was bridging building the you know filling the gaps that existed between us and Canada. — Okay. — So sure there was product work that was required to steer the you know work in and what makes sense for Canada but usually very little. A lot of thing was how are we going to build this architecture? what systems own? What systems are going to built in the central things and we hand it over to the central teams and whatnot. But overall my experience is very diverse. I have an undergrad in computer science. First half of my career is in engineering then is in product and most my most recent role was also in product. — And so talk to me a little bit about how you made these uh architecture decisions right between you know what gets built specifically for Canada, what's centralized and so on. How do you make these trade-offs? I think the simplest question that you need to ask is does anybody else needs it? Is this very specific for Canada — or if you're doing anything else like is this specific to this one customer? — Mhm. — Or it can be applied to more than one. If one, the choice is easy. If it's only for one, then you need to ask do I really need to build it, — right? — What happens if I don't build it? And this is where new product managers usually fall into the trap. I think the strongest skill that a product manager needs to build as they grow is knowing when not to build something or killing something that already exists versus building new because building new is sexy. Building new is exciting. Everybody wants to run towards that. — Mhm. deciding some not to build something or killing something are hard decisions that require lot of trust building communication you know making people shift their opinions you know uh that a lot of influence is required for that and that's a hard thing to do. So a lot of people usually uh choose the easy path and that's the reason we see a lot of products these days which have a spaghetti of features. 80% of them are never used, — right? Yeah. Simplifying and killing things takes more influence than building exciting new stuff. That

definitely makes sense. — By the way, before you go there, there is also an a leadership principle invent and simplify at Amazon. So if you're interviewing at Amazon, they will ask you a question or tell us about a time when you chose a simple solution for a complex problem, right? — Or when you solved multiple problems at the same time. — Mhm. — Right. The idea is they're looking for how can you invent and simplify? Like how did you build a simple solution that solved a big problem? — Can you tell us so you spend how much time do you spend there between two and three years, right? — Yeah, closer to three years. — Like how did you decide it was time to move on? I think it was the opportunity that landed in uh my plate along with some personal reasons. You know, I had to take some time off uh and whatnot and I needed more flexibility. But the most important thing was the new role that I I got hired for at Indeed. That gave me an opportunity to get closer to AI. — Okay. — I used AI before but not at the scale that I used it at Indeed. Right. So that was the most exciting uh part like building the search and recommendations and helping indeed move pivot from being a job board to a hiring and uh matching marketplace. Okay, — that was a monumental change and that gave me an opportunity to do things that I had never done before. So one thing that keeps me going is opportunity to learn enabling to create impact like that that's essentially two things not one but um one comes after another. anytime I felt that something is becoming muscle memory — right — it becomes very hard for me to keep stay motivated for that role because then it's like okay you know what I can do this in my sleep what value am I adding here right if something becomes muscle memory I can very well automate it too — yeah and so tell us I'm interested in that indeed story so what's the difference between a job board and AI matching marketplace — so I think the biggest difference is how the job seekers and the employer perceive the value — okay — right again these are my opinions. So not any official word from indeed or anybody. As a job board, all essentially you are doing is you are a lead generation tool for an employer. You are just getting bunch of leads in forms of applications from candidates. And from candidate standpoint, you're getting a bunch of leads. These are the jobs that you can apply to. — Yeah. — And when it's a lead generation tool, it's all about volumes because volume translates to money. And from the employer and the jobseker side too, you know, if you get 500 applications, most likely you'll find one that you need. — Okay? — But if you only get five, chances of you finding the right one is low and you don't probably you don't want to select the first one you find the right because you don't know if that's the best fit. — Okay? — But change shifting from there to going to hiring and matching marketplaces realizing that hiring is not a advertising business. hiring manager when they are screening resumes and interviewing candidates that's not their full-time job, — right? — If you run a business, if you are hiring for your business, — you are taking time away from your day job to do this extra responsibility. — Yeah. — So, the new value prop here is how can this platform help you save time? If Max was spending 15 hours a week for 5 weeks to hire for one role, if I can cut that time to 5 hours a week and cut this time to 2 weeks, I've saved you tremendous amount of money in terms of your time saving. — Yeah. — And how I can do that is I can make sure I prioritize the high most qualified candidates first for you. — Okay. — Right. And the most qualified as well as people who are looking to move also. Right? So like finding you know when you used to reach out to somebody would they even respond. So things like that are what become very important here. The other thing is in today's world every person every consumer is trained by algorithms for recommendations. Be it your Netflix, Spotify, — Instagram, YouTube, wherever you go you are fed this is what you should be watching. And the old word was you had to search for things like back in the day when you go to a video library like blockbuster or something you'll have to go walk through the aisle find the movie that you're looking for now you go to Netflix you know it shows here are the top 10 things that are you know most watched right now pick one so indeed also like so job market why does job market have to be different right why do candidates have to go and I am looking for this why can't we show them here are the best jobs that are that you are most qualified ified for and aligns with your best interests. So that was the underlying value prop as I understood it when I was operating on those and that's how I you know we built the systems we built. — That's super interesting. And so I mean I can hear you're super passionate right about products. I want to go back to the beginning of your career because that's not where you started right you were initially an engineer. So can you tell me that story of like going from you know software engineer and I think then you became an engineering manager and then you transitioned to products. So what was the that kind of like path like — it's a somewhat of a weird story. Um I start like I graduated with under undergrad in computer science started my career as a software engineer grew up the ranks became an engineering manager but always had this itch of becoming an entrepreneur. — Okay. I along with a friend of mine we started building our product while was building uh this was back in 2008 through 2012 and we were building sort of an online project management collaboration kind of a portal and this is the time when the likes of Riverside Zoom meet did not exist. The only thing that was there was Skype and with the low internet bandwidth Skype was a terrible solution. If anybody has used it they will remember. — Okay. So a lot of people actually always fell back on emails. For example, if Max is sitting in France, Jay is sitting in Seattle, if we need to collaborate on a project, right? Especially, let's say we are building a website together. — Yeah. — The only way people could do that was they will uh write up their comments and saying, "Hey, can you move this button by 10 pixels to the right, change this color to that? " And you know, all that was terrible. — Mhm. What we did was we created a system where you could just upload the screenshots, annotate on that. Like, hey, this button move here. Here's an arrow. You know, I move this text slightly down. Do whatever. And then the other problem with emails was emails tend to get forked, right? You and I start an email thread, — right? — You add two of your team members, one of the team members starts a thread with somebody else. — Yeah. — Like forks it only sends to them. And the loop never gets complete. — Mhm. And we have all been there when you are a new member to a project. You usually get thrown a series of threads in an email forwarded and the onus is on you to figure out where to start, where to end, what came first, what came last, what decision have been made, what doesn't have not been made. So what we were trying to do is like sort of what Slack does when you get added to a channel you have the entire history visible to you. So similar thing like if you get added, you know, you'll have the entire conversation with the project. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel, hammer the same decisions again and again. So we was building that and during this time what I enjoyed was or what I realized something about myself was I enjoyed solving technology problems less than solving business problem using technology. — Okay. — Right. So I enjoyed solving business problems lot more than saying why is this system 5 milliseconds slow. — I could do that at least at that time but I enjoyed solving like why did the customer not like this? Okay. — And that's when we moved out of our when we sold the company and we took an exit, that's when I was thinking about what is the new role that I can go into and that's when I stumbled on oh there is something called a product manager. — Okay. — And that's how I I kind of started there. — Okay. So your transition was actually from like software engineering to entrepreneurship to product to like corporate product management. Interesting. And so what are you up to today then? I took a sabbatical about three and a half months ago to spend some time with my dad. Okay. Wasn't getting any younger anytime soon. 84 years old. Uh now I'm actually it was much needed soatical. I had been working for 25 plus years with no breaks. — Mhm. — So I took some time to reflect back on my career and whatnot. So now I'm focusing my energy a lot more on practically on three things. I am helping out my kids in thinking about what their future needs to be. So I have two kids. My daughter is 20 years old. My son is 17. My daughter is already in college. So like figuring out in this evolving world with AI, what would you know the future look like uh and whatnot. The second is I'm spending a bunch of time in coaching and mentoring people usually through uh word of mouth or the people that I've worked with in the past, the people that reported to me in the past uh in how they should think about their careers and how to prepare for the inevitable, right? So AI is here to stay. AI is not a blip in the chart. Uh and it's accelerating at a much faster rate that we that humans can comprehend. So preparing yourself for the next 10, 20, 30 years with an open mindset that you need to evolve is very important. The third thing is I am working on a AI startup. Uh it's still in stealth, so I'm not going to disclose what the idea is. Uh but over the course of uh next couple of months, I should be able to announce what I'm building. — Awesome. That's amazing. Well, it was uh great having that conversation with you, Jay. We, you know, certainly learned a lot about how things work at Amazon and yeah, it was just super interesting to hear how you went from to engineering to entrepreneurship to product. So, thanks for making the time to have that conversation. Appreciate it. — Yeah, pleasure is mine and uh I'm happy to answer any questions. Feel free to reach out. — If you want to do a mock interview with a coach who's worked at your target company, just go to i gotanoffer. com.