How Amazon uses Leadership Principles
Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles (LPs) are not just marketing. Every Amazon interview question is mapped to one or more LPs and assessed on a standardised rubric. Your interviewers submit scorecards rating you on specific LPs. Hiring is determined by how well you demonstrate the LPs through your examples, not by your technical skills alone. Understanding this — that Amazon is specifically evaluating you against these 16 criteria — changes how you prepare.
The current 16 LPs are: Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Are Right A Lot, Learn and Be Curious, Hire and Develop the Best, Insist on the Highest Standards, Think Big, Bias for Action, Frugality, Earn Trust, Dive Deep, Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit, Deliver Results, Strive to Be Earth's Best Employer, and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. The last two were added in 2021.
The STAR method for Amazon LP questions
Amazon uses behavioral interview questions exclusively for LP assessment. Every question starts with "Tell me about a time..." or "Describe a situation when...". The expected answer format is STAR: Situation (brief context), Task (what you specifically needed to do), Action (what you did — this is 70% of the answer), Result (quantified outcomes where possible). Amazon interviewers probe deeply with follow-up questions: "What was the biggest obstacle?", "What would you do differently?", "What did you specifically do versus the team?" Prepare stories that can sustain 15 to 20 minutes of probing.
Most commonly tested LPs and example questions
Customer Obsession: "Tell me about a time you went beyond what the customer asked for to deliver something they actually needed." Strong answer: a time you identified an unspoken customer need through data, observation, or direct research — not just a time you were polite to a customer.
Ownership: "Tell me about a time you took ownership of a problem that was outside your scope." Strong answer: a problem that was not your responsibility but that you identified, took on, and drove to resolution — including the business outcome. "We" is a red flag; "I" is required.
Bias for Action: "Tell me about a time you made a decision with incomplete information and it turned out to be the right call." Show that you can calculate acceptable risk and act rather than waiting for certainty. Include how you bounded the downside: "I knew that if I was wrong, the cost would be X, which was acceptable. If I was right, the upside was Y."
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: "Describe a time you disagreed with your manager's decision. What did you do?" The answer must show you made your case clearly and directly (not passive-aggressively), then committed fully once the decision was made. Saying nothing and complaining to colleagues scores zero on this LP.
How to prepare your LP stories
Prepare at least 12 stories. Each story should be mappable to multiple LPs: a story about staying late to fix a production issue can demonstrate Ownership, Deliver Results, Insist on Highest Standards, and Bias for Action simultaneously. Write your stories in a spreadsheet with columns for each LP and mark which ones each story covers. Before the interview, identify which LPs are most likely to be assessed for your level and role (check the job description — it often lists the LPs assessed).
Quantify results wherever possible. "The project launched on time" is weaker than "the project launched two weeks ahead of schedule and generated $1.2M in revenue in Q1." Amazon interviewers are trained to look for measurable impact, and answers without numbers lose points on the Deliver Results LP.