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Customer Obsession Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
How to remember this principle: Focus on customers’ needs and work to exceed their expectations.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to prioritize customer needs, and develop products and solutions that address them.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Focusing on internal processes or individual preferences instead of the customer’s perspective.Potential Answers:
- Pywinauto library
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Ownership Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”
How to remember this principle: Take responsibility for your work, think long-term, and act on behalf of the entire company.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to take initiative, be accountable, and make decisions that benefit the organization.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Shifting blame, focusing on short-term gains, or having a narrow perspective.- Tell us about a time when you took ownership of a project and its outcome.
- Describe a situation where you made a decision that had long-term benefits for your team or company.
- How have you acted as an owner in your previous roles?
- Give an example of when you took responsibility for a mistake and turned it into a learning opportunity.
- Tell us about a time when you proactively identified and addressed a problem that was not your responsibility.
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Invent and Simplify Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here.” As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.
How to remember this principle: Encourage innovation, look for new ideas, and simplify complex processes.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to think creatively, challenge the status quo, and streamline processes.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Resisting change, getting stuck in traditional ways of thinking, or complicating solutions.- Describe a situation where you invented a new solution to a problem.
- Tell us about a time when you simplified a complex process.
- How have you fostered innovation within your team?
- Give an example of when you challenged conventional wisdom and found a better solution.
- Describe an innovative idea you proposed and how you implemented it.
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Are Right, A Lot Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.
How to remember this principle: Make informed decisions, seek diverse perspectives, and maintain high standards.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to make sound judgments, learn from mistakes, and be open to feedback.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Being overly confident, inflexible, or unwilling to learn from mistakes.- Tell us about a time when you made a difficult decision that turned out to be correct.
- Describe a situation where you sought multiple perspectives before making a decision.
- How do you ensure your decisions are well-informed and accurate?
- Give an example of when you admitted to being wrong and learned from it.
- Tell us about a time when you had to make a decision with limited information.
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Learn and Be Curious Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.
How to remember this principle: Continuously learn, seek new knowledge, and be open to new ideas.
What this principle is evaluating: Your commitment to personal and professional growth, curiosity, and adaptability.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Becoming complacent, stagnant, or resistant to learning new things.- Describe a time when you learned a new skill or technology to solve a problem.
- Tell us about a situation where your curiosity led to a positive outcome.
- How do you stay up-to-date with industry trends and emerging technologies?
- Give an example of when you had to adapt to a significant change in your work environment.
- Describe a project where you had to learn something new quickly to meet a deadline.
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Hire and Develop the Best Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.
How to remember this principle: Recruit top talent, mentor team members, and foster a culture of growth.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to identify, hire, and develop high-performing individuals.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Settling for average performers or neglecting team development.- Tell us about a time when you hired a high-performing employee and how you identified their potential.
- Describe a situation where you mentored or coached a team member to improve their performance.
- How do you foster a culture of growth and development within your team?
- Give an example of when you had to let go of an underperforming team member.
- Tell us about a time when you helped a team member advance their career.
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Insist on the Highest Standards Leaders have relentlessly high standards — many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
How to remember this principle: Set high expectations, drive quality, and continuously raise the bar.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to maintain high standards, identify areas for improvement, and push for excellence.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Accepting mediocrity or failing to challenge yourself and others.- Describe a time when you set high standards for a project and how it impacted the outcome.
- Tell us about a situation where you identified a quality issue and took steps to correct it.
- How do you ensure your team maintains high standards?
- Give an example of when you had to push for excellence in the face of obstacles.
- Describe a time when you raised the bar for your team or organization.
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Think Big Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.
How to remember this principle: Embrace bold ideas, create long-term visions, and focus on high-impact projects.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to envision the future, take calculated risks, and drive ambitious projects.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Focusing on short-term wins or small-scale improvements.- Tell us about a time when you pursued a bold idea that led to significant success.
- Describe a long-term vision you developed and how it influenced your team’s direction.
- How do you prioritize high-impact projects and initiatives?
- Give an example of when you took a calculated risk that paid off.
- Describe a situation where you had to convince others to think big and embrace a bold vision.
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Bias for Action Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.
How to remember this principle: Make timely decisions, take calculated risks, and avoid analysis paralysis.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to act decisively, prioritize effectively, and manage uncertainty.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Procrastination, indecision, or being overly cautious.- Describe a time when you had to make a quick decision with limited information.
- Tell us about a situation where you took action to resolve a problem before it escalated.
- How do you balance speed and thoroughness when making decisions?
- Give an example of when you took a calculated risk to achieve a goal.
- Describe a time when you had to prioritize tasks to meet tight deadlines.
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Frugality Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.
How to remember this principle: Accomplish more with less, optimize resources, and find creative ways to save money.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to maximize resources, identify cost-saving opportunities, and maintain financial discipline.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Wasteful spending, over-reliance on costly solutions, or failing to prioritize resource optimization.- Describe a time when you found a cost-effective solution to a problem.
- Tell us about a situation where you optimized resources to achieve better results.
- How do you ensure your team operates efficiently and within budget?
- Give an example of when you identified a cost-saving opportunity and implemented it.
- Describe a project where you had to accomplish more with less.
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Earn Trust Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
How to remember this principle: Build strong relationships, communicate openly, and demonstrate integrity.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to gain trust, collaborate effectively, and show respect for others.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Dishonesty, lack of transparency, or failing to treat others with respect.- Describe a time when you earned the trust of a colleague or team member.
- Tell us about a situation where you had to repair a damaged professional relationship.
- How do you ensure open and honest communication within your team?
- Give an example of when you demonstrated integrity in a difficult situation.
- Describe a time when you showed empathy and understanding towards a colleague.
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Dive Deep Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.
How to remember this principle: Understand the details, ask probing questions, and maintain a hands-on approach.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to analyze complex issues, identify root causes, and stay connected to the details.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Overlooking important details, superficial analysis, or being detached from the work.- Describe a time when you conducted a deep dive analysis to solve a problem.
- Tell us about a situation where your attention to detail led to a positive outcome.
- How do you ensure you stay connected to the details while managing a team?
- Give an example of when you identified the root cause of a complex issue.
- Describe a project where you had to balance diving deep with delegating tasks.
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Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
How to remember this principle: Voice your opinion, challenge decisions, but commit to the team’s decision once it’s made.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to assert your viewpoint, accept disagreement, and support team decisions.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Being overly passive, confrontational, or failing to commit after a decision is made.
- Describe a time when you disagreed with a decision and voiced your concerns.
- Tell us about a situation where you had to commit to a decision you initially disagreed with.
- How do you handle disagreements within your team?
- Give an example of when you constructively challenged a colleague’s idea.
- Describe a time when you had to balance advocating for your ideas with supporting the team’s consensus.
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Deliver Results Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.
How to remember this principle: Focus on outcomes, overcome obstacles, and drive projects to completion.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to set goals, execute effectively, and deliver high-quality results.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Focusing on activities rather than outcomes or failing to meet commitments.- Describe a time when you delivered a significant result under challenging circumstances.
- Tell us about a project where you successfully managed multiple priorities to meet deadlines.
- How do you ensure your team stays focused on delivering results?
- Give an example of when you overcame obstacles to achieve a project goal.
- Describe a time when you had to adjust your approach to deliver results on time and within budget.
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Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
How to remember this principle: Create an inclusive and diverse work environment, invest in employee development, and prioritize employee well-being.
What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to foster a supportive, inclusive, and high-performing work culture.
What pitfalls you should avoid: Neglecting employee development, failing to promote diversity and inclusion, or overlooking employee well-being.- Describe a time when you took action to promote diversity and inclusion within your team.
- Tell us about a situation where you prioritized employee well-being.
- How do you create a supportive and inclusive work environment for your team?
- Give an example of when you invested in the development of a team member.
- Describe a time when you had to balance team performance with employee well-being.
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Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
How to remember this principle: Be responsible for the impact of your actions, consider long-term consequences, and work towards a sustainable future. What this principle is evaluating: Your ability to consider the wider implications of your work and make responsible decisions. What pitfalls you should avoid: Ignoring the broader impact of your actions or prioritizing short-term gains over long-term responsibility.
- Describe a time when you made a decision that took into account the broader implications for your company or industry.
- Tell us about a situation where you considered the long-term consequences of a project or decision.
- How do you ensure your team’s actions align with the company’s broader responsibilities?
- Give an example of when you advocated for a sustainable solution or practice.
- Describe a time when you had to balance immediate success with long-term responsibility.
Potential Answers:
1. Customer Obsession
Tell us about a time you worked backward from the customer.
Situation: At AT&T, our team automates RF engineering workflows in a tool called Atoll.
Task: Engineers were spending hours doing repetitive remote gain calculations—a step critical for proper network planning.
Action: Even though our API didn’t support this calculation, I identified a workaround using the Pywinauto library to simulate the manual steps within the GUI.
Result: This saved each engineer ~30 minutes per site, scaling up to hundreds of hours saved monthly and greatly improved user satisfaction.
2. Ownership
Describe a time you took full ownership of a project.
Situation: We were releasing a batch-processing tool for network planning.
Task: The tool had to be executable by non-technical engineers via a simple UI.
Action: I led the development of a Tkinter-based desktop app that allowed CSV batch submission and visualized the process flow. I also created documentation and addressed post-launch bugs myself.
Result: The tool was adopted across multiple teams and reduced support tickets by 40% in the first month.
3. Invent and Simplify
Tell us about a time you simplified a complex process.
Situation: Engineers struggled to track which steps in a planning batch had succeeded or failed.
Task: Make the process transparent without requiring deep logs.
Action: I added visual status indicators in the UI and modularized the pipeline to report progress per step.
Result: What used to require debugging 300-line log files became a 5-second UI scan. Engineers praised the simplicity and clarity.
4. Are Right, A Lot
Tell us about a time your judgment proved correct.
Situation: We debated whether to decouple a legacy component from our automation workflow.
Task: I believed it was brittle and would hinder future growth.
Action: I refactored the code, separating it behind an interface and wrote tests for each function.
Result: Two months later, the legacy tool broke due to a software update—but our system remained functional thanks to the abstraction. My early call prevented a critical outage.
5. Learn and Be Curious
Tell us about a time you had to learn something new quickly.
Situation: Our API couldn’t handle a core feature—remote gain calculation.
Task: Find a workaround in under a week.
Action: I discovered Pywinauto and spent the weekend learning it. I quickly scripted GUI automation for Atoll.
Result: Delivered a functional prototype in 3 days. That script is still used today and saved us from needing vendor support.
6. Hire and Develop the Best
(If no hiring experience, use mentoring)
Describe a time you mentored someone.
Situation: A new teammate joined our team and was struggling with integrating with the Atoll tool.
Task: Help him ramp up quickly.
Action: I paired with him on a task, shared my documentation, and walked him through the tooling in a one-on-one crash course.
Result: Within two weeks, he was able to take on a full feature independently and later shipped a critical patch solo.
7. Insist on the Highest Standards
Tell us about a time you pushed for higher quality.
Situation: A feature was being fast-tracked for deployment without tests.
Task: Ensure quality even under time pressure.
Action: I insisted we write test cases and offered to take on the load myself. I covered unit tests and edge cases.
Result: The release went smoothly with no post-deployment issues. The team adopted a “tests-first” attitude on future features.
8. Think Big
Describe a time you had a bold idea.
Situation: Our automation only worked for individual sites.
Task: I envisioned a batch processing framework that could handle hundreds of sites simultaneously.
Action: I proposed and built an architecture supporting parallel site workflows with status tracking and retry logic.
Result: This reduced processing time by 70% and opened up the tool for regional-level usage.
9. Bias for Action
Tell us about a time you acted quickly.
Situation: A backend pipeline was failing, blocking dozens of site submissions.
Task: Quickly restore functionality.
Action: I diagnosed the logs, identified a config path error, and pushed a hotfix within the hour.
Result: Restored system uptime with minimal delay. I later wrote a script to auto-check for this class of issue.
10. Frugality
Describe a time you achieved more with less.
Situation: We had no budget for new software to automate a GUI-only task.
Task: Automate without purchasing a commercial tool.
Action: I used open-source tools (Pywinauto and Tkinter) to automate Atoll and create a usable interface.
Result: Delivered a production-grade automation pipeline at zero cost.
11. Earn Trust
Tell us about a time when you earned the trust of a colleague or team.
Situation: I joined a team at AT&T mid-project, where prior work had introduced instability in our automation tool.
Task: I needed to build trust and prove I could contribute meaningful fixes.
Action: I took the time to understand the legacy system and proactively fixed two recurring bugs in the first week. I shared my findings transparently and created a Slack FAQ channel to support the team.
Result: My teammates began looping me in for design reviews, and leadership later asked me to demo my work in a cross-functional meeting.
12. Dive Deep
Describe a time when you went deep to solve a problem others overlooked.
Situation: A batch was failing intermittently in production, but no one could replicate it.
Task: Understand the edge case and fix it.
Action: I pulled logs, stepped through the pipeline locally, and noticed a timezone mismatch in datetime parsing—something easy to miss.
Result: Fixing it resolved the issue permanently. I also updated our date-handling logic to be timezone-aware throughout the app.
13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Describe a time when you disagreed with a decision but committed afterward.
Situation: A teammate proposed using Excel macros for automation instead of extending our Python pipeline.
Task: I believed this was brittle and hard to maintain, so I voiced concerns.
Action: I respectfully laid out potential risks, including versioning and reproducibility issues, and proposed a Python script instead.
Result: The team opted for the macro route due to time constraints. I still helped them polish it, wrote tests around it, and fully supported the decision. Later, we migrated to the Python version when time allowed.
14. Deliver Results
Describe a time when you delivered a major result under pressure.
Situation: A team-wide tool had to be demoed to directors, but the data export feature wasn’t functional.
Task: Fix it in 48 hours with no formal support from the original developer.
Action: I dove into unfamiliar code, debugged the root issue (incorrect file path sanitization), and wrote a fix.
Result: The demo went smoothly. Leadership praised the tool’s completeness, and I was later asked to own future versions.
15. Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer
Tell us about a time you supported a teammate’s well-being.
Situation: A teammate was struggling silently while juggling multiple tasks during a release week.
Task: Help redistribute the workload and keep morale high.
Action: I spoke to them privately, offered to take on one of their modules, and flagged to my manager that they might benefit from some bandwidth adjustment.
Result: They were able to recover their focus without burnout, and our release stayed on track. They later thanked me for creating a safe space to speak up.
16. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
Describe a time when you made a decision with long-term implications in mind.
Situation: We were considering hardcoding site-specific logic to solve a one-off issue.
Task: I realized this could lead to technical debt and maintenance headaches.
Action: I suggested we instead parameterize the pipeline to handle config files per site. I wrote the config handler and documented the system.
Result: That design now supports dozens of sites and can scale to new regions with no code changes—saving us engineering hours and reducing human error.
Let me know if you’d like to personalize any of these more, swap in other stories (e.g. from your Amazon or GoLinks internships), or create polished versions for a doc or prep sheet.