The 16 Leadership Principles, groupedCore idea
Customer and vision
Customer Obsession
Start with the customer and work backwards.
Think Big
Create and communicate a bold direction.
Are Right, A Lot
Strong judgment and good instincts.
Learn and Be Curious
Never stop learning.
Execution and action
Bias for Action
Speed matters, especially for decisions you can undo.
Dive Deep
Work at every level and check the data.
Deliver Results
Focus on the key inputs and get them done.
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Challenge respectfully, then commit to the decision.
Team and growth
Ownership
Act on behalf of the whole company.
Hire and Develop the Best
Raise the bar and mentor others.
Insist on the Highest Standards
Keep raising the bar.
Frugality
Achieve more with less.
Trust and improvement
Earn Trust
Listen carefully, speak candidly.
Invent and Simplify
Look for simple ways to improve.
Strive to Be Earth’s Best Employer
Build a company of builders.
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
Do the right thing for communities.
How to map your stories to principlesHow it works
Each of your 8–10 strongest stories should map to one main principle and one or two secondary ones. Amazon asks follow-ups like “give me another example of Ownership”, so have at least two stories for each of the most-asked principles: Ownership, Customer Obsession, Bias for Action, Dive Deep and Deliver Results.
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graph LR
S["a story from<br/>your work"] --> M{"which LP<br/>fits best?"}
M -->|"owned an outcome"| P1["Ownership"]
M -->|"shipped a fix fast"| P2["Bias for Action"]
M -->|"dug into the data"| P3["Dive Deep"]
M -->|"helped the customer"| P4["Customer Obsession"]
M -->|"hit the metric"| P5["Deliver Results"]
class S blue
class M yellow
class P1,P2,P3,P4,P5 green
classDef orange fill:#ffd8a8,stroke:#1e1e1e,color:#1e1e1e
classDef blue fill:#a5d8ff,stroke:#1e1e1e,color:#1e1e1e
classDef green fill:#b2f2bb,stroke:#1e1e1e,color:#1e1e1e
classDef red fill:#ffc9c9,stroke:#1e1e1e,color:#1e1e1e
classDef violet fill:#d0bfff,stroke:#1e1e1e,color:#1e1e1e
classDef yellow fill:#ffec99,stroke:#1e1e1e,color:#1e1e1e
classDef grey fill:#e9ecef,stroke:#1e1e1e,color:#1e1e1eThe STAR + LP answer templatePattern
Answer every behavioral question in the same shape, so the interviewer can find your evidence quickly:
Situation (~15 s)
Context, scope, and who you were serving.
Task (~10 s)
The outcome you owned.
Action (~45 s)
What you personally did, with data and trade-offs.
Result (~20 s)
Measurable impact, in numbers.
Principle tag (~5 s)
“That story is really about Ownership.”
Sample answer (Ownership)Example
Situation: last Black Friday our payment retries spiked 8x and orders were silently failing. Task: I owned fixing checkout reliability end to end. Action: I traced failures to a timezone bug in retry scheduling, built a monitor in one night, then drove a full fix with the platform team, including writing the postmortem. Result: retry failures dropped 99%, and we reclaimed $40K in lost revenue that month. That was practicing Ownership.
The bar raiserIn the interview
Amazon's bar raiseris a specially trained interviewer from outside the hiring team, who does not report to the hiring manager and can veto the hire. Their job is to protect the hiring bar, so they probe hard: “what did youpersonally do?” and “what did it cost?”
Common Amazon interview mistakesPitfalls
Frequently asked questionsFAQ
How much of the Amazon loop is behavioral?
Roughly half of each of the first three interviews is behavioral, and one dedicated one-on-one is almost entirely leadership principles. The bar raiser then checks every answer you gave for consistency and depth. For an SDE loop of five to six rounds, expect four to five rounds with behavioral components.
Should I read entire stories from my resume or memorize?
Never memorize full stories. Amazon's follow-up chain is specifically designed to break rehearsed answers, because it asks about decisions you did not anticipate. Build a story bank of eight to ten real experiences you know cold, then pick and adapt the closest one live based on which principle the question targets.
Do junior candidates need 16 principles too?
No, not as a reading exercise. Interns and new graduates are graded against a narrower subset: Ownership, Customer Obsession, Bias for Action, Invent and Simplify, and Deliver Results show up most often, with Earn Trust close behind. Mastering those six well beats skimming all sixteen.