A day in the life of an Amazon VP
Normal days, big decisions, and crisis management
Welcome to this week’s free article of Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see the benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager.
Sue Bethanis (Executive Coach & CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership) and I are offering a free live Lightning Lesson through Maven on Monday, September 16. We will discuss “Up Your Game to Influence Senior Leaders”.
Over 400 people have RSVP’d.
It’s free, sign up here.
I was asked to describe my typical day as an Amazon Director and VP.
My answer was short: “meetings.”
That was accurate, but here I will go into more detail.
I will cover normal days, big decisions, and crisis management.
1. Normal Days
On “normal” days, my answer of “meetings” was pretty accurate. As a team leader of several hundred people and several businesses with hundreds of millions in revenue, my calendar was always full and often double or triple-booked. Once I was a director, I had the luxury of an executive assistant (EA) who would try to keep my days organized. Like many executives, I fell into a pattern of going where my EA directed me to go.
The most common types of meetings were:
One-on-ones with my direct reports, a few skip levels, and my manager.
Team meetings, either with my own team or my manager’s team.
Project meetings about the status of some key product or initiative.
The point of all these meetings was to gather information I needed, to give information that others needed, to develop my team members, and to resolve problems with project progress.
If you want to learn how to use executive 1:1s well, explore my Career Talk on this topic.
The normal daily work of a leader is developing their team and organizing work to get things done. Since leaders do not do the work themselves, the “daily work” is meeting with others.
2. Big Decisions
For big decisions, we would often have several meetings over time where we gathered information about the decision. At Amazon, this information would be turned into one of the famous six-page narratives, which would be reviewed offline and in one or more meetings for completeness and correctness (read this for three business writing strategies).
Once ready, the document would be taken to the decision-makers and everyone would read it for about 20 minutes. Once everyone was done reading, we would discuss the information in the document. The best outcome was a clear decision that we could implement. But, we would often realize that we needed additional information or wanted to look at different options. In this case, the team would revise the document and go through the review process again.
This process leads to good decisions, but it takes time and energy. This is why it is reserved for the most important decisions.
3. Crisis Management
When something goes wrong, a leader must clear their calendar to coordinate the response. In cases like this, I would message my EA to “clear my calendar.” With all meetings canceled, I would go into a “war room” with the team and focus solely on the critical issue.
I enjoyed these situations, despite the pressure, because they allowed me to focus on just one thing.
I got good at crisis management, which involves:
Clarifying the problem
Getting the right people in the room
Communicating status to leaders while the experts work
Getting experts the resources they need
In this post, I wrote about surviving a crisis where I personally disappointed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
I then wrote a follow-up post on how to care for your team in a crisis, the mistakes I made, and the lessons I learned.
Leaders do other things, but these 3 “days” give a sense of the average executive day.
Learn actionable skills for top performance in VP, SVP, & CXO roles
If you are currently in an executive role (e.g. Director, Sr. Director, VP) and want to optimize performance or move up further, consider my live course, Cracking the C-suite 'How to Get and Master Key Executive Roles' which I co-teach with Sue Bethanis (Executive Coach & CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership) who has coached 400+ tech executives and was my best coach when I was an Amazon VP.
The next cohort is October 5-6 and will be capped at 50 executives.
We will go in-depth on Strategic Influence, Scale Culture, Develop Talent, and Executive Presence. We place a high emphasis on case studies and group discussions. You will cultivate peer relationships with other high-performing leaders.
Here’s what some of the leaders said:
“Wealth of knowledge gained from real-world experiences, unexpected curveballs, and people issues shared in 2 days! Super productive course with a ton of learnings and actionable tips. Highly recommended!”
“This course served some of the best leadership content at executive level that I've ever been part of. Ethan's experience is delivered in a very insightful and relatable way, with concrete actions and ways to apply and no fluff; Sue complements this and brings structure and system to challenge present beliefs and implement more easily. The cohort itself provided as much good provoking thought as the course presenters, so I walk away with far more than I bargained for. Highly recommended!”
“Uplevel yourself with the skillsets and framework to make the jump into the C-Suite. This course gets straight to the point while providing ample time for coaching, questions and networking among a group of highly successful leaders across the industry. Walk away with actionable next steps to get you from here… to there.”
Day in the life of an Amazon VP — FAQs
Q1: Is the context switching as a VP from back-to-back meetings hard?
It is a skill / personality.
I did ok with a short, thrashing attention span.
You can see it as hard, and sometimes it is, or you can see it as a way to never get bored because something new is only moments away.
Q2: What about the mind of always being ready to get the hands dirty?
Being ready to jump in where needed is important. I think it is equally important to know when to not get your hands dirty and let others work their process. Both are skills.
Q3: Seems like “organized” chaos lovers actually become the managers.
My conclusion is close but also different.
Managers need to be good at lots of task switching and interrupts because a big part of your job is responding to emerging needs as they happen.
Q4: How do you expect AI to transform/enhance the role of senior leadership?
I think it can greatly speed and ease the information gathering and distribution, leaving more time for more valuable activities like decision-making and investing in employee careers/development.
It may also ultimately mean flatter organizations. With simplified communications, a leader may be able to have a larger span of control more easily.
That said, accurately predicting the impact of AI is very hard.
Q5: There are shared elements (I.e, clarifying the problem) between big decisions and crisis management, outside the six-page narrative, what other elements are unique and different from those two meetings?
I would say on decisions, the top focus is on the right choices whereas in a crisis the focus is on rapid results.
So yes, similarities in some ways, but with different goals (accuracy versus speed).
Q6: Have you tried to stay hands-on as you rose to VP? If yes, what prevented you from it? I've always admired the "player-coach" model that can solve a crisis with the team, from the top and side by side.
Candidly I didn’t really try. I saw my job as leading 800 people well, not trying to compete as a software engineer with them.
I personally think the hands-on thing is a red herring. I know others strongly disagree, but I think if you change professions from software engineer (or whatever) to leader then you should focus on leading, not trying to remain a hands-on software engineer.
I do not expect everyone to agree. But what I did worked for me.
Q7: As you are mentoring and growing careers on your team, how do you prepare ICs for that switch? I know you were a few steps removed from managing ICs directly but were there methods you employed with your managers to guide those conversations?
My three most critical pieces of guidance were:
Do you realize this is a new type of job for which you are untrained?
Do you want to make that change (looking deeper into reasons than only pay or power)?
What is your plan to reeducate yourself for this new type of work and get good at it?
Q8: How do you manage employee engagement?
Site visits and all hands coupled with weekly emails.
I decided to leave out the travel from this summary but it is a part of the job and can be a big part. One year I spent 70 days on the road and I am sure others spent a lot more.
Connect With Ethan & Jason
Ethan’s live online courses and on-demand courses.
Level Up is your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans.