Amazon's Leadership Principles for sales interviews
Every question in an AWS sales interview maps back to Amazon's Leadership Principles. Most guides explain them for engineers and product managers. Here's what each one is really testing when you sell for a living.
Amazon publishes the official wording on its careers site and updates it from time to time, so read it there too. The table below is our plain-English view of what an interviewer wants to hear from a seller.
| Principle | What they're checking in a seller |
|---|---|
| Customer Obsession | You start with the customer's problem and work back to the deal |
| Ownership | You act beyond your own patch and think long term |
| Invent and Simplify | You found a new or simpler way to sell or fix a process |
| Are Right, A Lot | Your judgement calls were backed by data and turned out well |
| Learn and Be Curious | You taught yourself something that changed your results |
| Hire and Develop the Best | You coached or onboarded people, or raised the bar |
| Insist on the Highest Standards | You stopped a weak proposal, forecast or delivery going out |
| Think Big | You set an ambitious account or territory plan and got others behind it |
| Bias for Action | You moved quickly with incomplete information |
| Frugality | You got more done with less budget, time or headcount |
| Earn Trust | You were honest, took feedback well and owned your mistakes |
| Dive Deep | You went into the data to find what was really going on |
| Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit | You challenged a decision respectfully, then backed the outcome |
| Deliver Results | You hit or beat a number despite setbacks |
| Strive to be Earth's Best Employer | You made work better for the people around you |
| Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility | You thought about the wider impact, beyond the immediate win |
How to use this
Match a real story to each principle. One deal, one date, one number. Then aim for two stories per principle, because each interviewer in the loop digs into a few principles and the same one can come up more than once.
The usual gaps for sellers are Frugality, Hire and Develop the Best, and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. If you manage no one, a story about onboarding a new colleague or improving a shared process can cover Hire and Develop the Best.
Questions
How many Leadership Principles are there?
Amazon currently lists 16. Check the official list on its careers site, as it is updated from time to time.
Which Leadership Principles matter most for sales roles?
Any can come up, but Customer Obsession, Ownership, Dive Deep, Earn Trust, Deliver Results and Bias for Action appear often in sales interviews.
Turn this into a prep plan you can actually follow
A Notion workbook for AWS sales interviews: a story bank that scores your stories as you write them, 29 question patterns mapped to the principles, a planner for every round and a day-of cheat sheet. £29, one payment.
Principled Pitch is independent and has no connection with Amazon or AWS. Amazon publishes the official Leadership Principles on its careers site.