My next live career talk and Q&A is March 4 (Monday) on the topic Executive 1:1s. Learn what a 1:1 between an SVP and VP looks like, how to know what topics to surface, how to prepare, and more.
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My path to Amazon Vice President - can you get there faster?
Here are my specific ideas on how you can try to do so (I hope you do if you wish!)
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates all became CEOs very early by founding their own companies. If you can do this, it is the fastest path. An "instant promotion to CEO."
For most people reading, the chance to found your own unicorn startup is probably past and you have some "traditional" corporate experience.
My path was roughly:
1993: Engineer
1995: Lead Engineer / TPM
1996: Manager
1998: Director (midsize company)
2000: VP (startup, ~30 team members)
2001: VP (startup #2, ~15 team members)
2004: VP (startup #3, ~15 team members)
2005: Sr. Manager (Amazon, 6 team members)
2007: Director (Amazon, 22 team members)
2013: VP (Amazon, 500 team members)
2020: Retired, age 50
A VP in a startup is not the same executive level as a VP at a large company, which is why I list the number of team members. Titles can be deceptive. For a period in 2017-2018, I held an SVP/acting CTO title at Twitch, an Amazon subsidiary.
While you can become a CEO by founding your own company, it may not mean much (I could call myself CEO of my Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) today).
So, if you are going to "climb the ladder" rather than "build the ladder as you go" (the CEO path), how long does it take?
As you can see, in my case it took 20 years, from 1993 to 2013.
From looking at my peers at Amazon and the people I coach today, my path was "about average." Some people became executives 3 to 5 years earlier than I did. Very few were much faster. Some took 3 to 5 years longer, again with a few much slower.
Generally, those on a much slower trajectory were not going to make it to the executive level at all. From what I have seen, to get to VP or higher, you must be rising at a certain velocity.
Many companies have some variation of a "high potential" program.
These programs are self-fulfilling — the people are thought to have high potential, so they are given special resources and opportunities, which leads to them growing quickly, which confirms that they have high potential.
Whether or not your company officially has such a program, the evaluation exists.
Special attention is given to those in the top performance rating bucket, or who win certain awards.
Thus, two tips:
If you are outside of this cadre, you must break into it.
You break in / stay in by having significant, high-visibility wins that get leaders to believe you are "great." Just being competent won't do it. Take a risk if you must.
Better to lose big and switch companies than to stay stuck in the middle. Big wins and big losses work better than consistent middle performance. You must have the big wins and that means risking the big losses, and sometimes risks will be realized.
More than 450 senior managers and leaders have taken the class.
It is rated 4.7/5 by alumni.
An alumni landed their role at a FAANG company, saying:
“What was key was that I actively participated in the live course AND followed through with some participants afterwards to talk shop and build relationships. One of those relationships just happened to be able to help when I needed it. Simply adding connections wouldn’t have been successful as they would have had no context about me, and not enough trust to put me in touch with important people in THEIR network.”
Over 100 people are enrolled in the next cohort starting March 9, 2024.
Gosh, so many were fun. I really loved my early lead engineer days. I loved my first startup VP job. And then I loved some of my Amazon Director job very much. What was the same in all the best jobs was:
High growth - always expanding
Clear mission - we knew what to do, so the challenge was how to grow and do it.
Good leaders
In those roles, I had the most supportive leaders of my career in many ways. Good, strong, experienced people who were teaching me how to grow.
Some of the other jobs were turnarounds or mess cleanups, and often also did not have the strongest leaders (which is why they had messes for me to clean up).
You cannot control whether or not economic times are good, but you can be smart about choosing a good leader when you can. That is probably the most actionable thing - choose who to work for carefully.
Q2: Which role stretched you the furthest?
Biggest stretch role was clearly the Amazon Director role from 2007 to 2013 (read more here). In that time I went from having never managed more than 30 people to 300+, and from having never managed more than one or two remote people to having offices around the globe. I also took on more types of functions I had never led. That was my biggest stretch period, learning to manage globally.
Q3: From people I've seen rise to high levels at FAANG, I've wondered how much benefitted from being in the right place at the right time. Having been at both Amazon and now Meta, neither company is in the hyper growth mode that it was years ago. That being the case, do you think it's harder to move up in the bigger companies now than it used to be?
100% I think so. The FAANG companies are still great for big paychecks and large scale work, but Amazon grew from 14,000 people to 1.4M people while I was there. It cannot grow 100x again without growing to employ 140M people, which is of course highly unlikely (i.e. all of the UK and Germany plus more).
Q4: Agree that finding a high growth environment seems like a must both to speed up opportunities (for climbing or personal growth or incubating new projects) but also for the conversion multiplier to your earnings. I am not sure a VP at purely extraction businesses (say AT&T) would be able to retire at 50.. may need to get quite a bit higher than that on the ladder. I am sure it helped you too to be at AMZN when joining the company still carried some long term risks.
Yes to what you said, but also, a lot of it depends on how you use the income you get. Many of my peers bought much larger houses, boats, and whatever. That is a fine choice, but they continue to work to pay for them. I chose to live on less. People were astounded, even critical, of the old cars I would drive. I bought used cars, so I was always in a car 10 years old with 100k+ miles and usually a dent or two for good measure. Not very "VP"-like in the eyes of some.
Could I have retired from AT&T? I do not know. I do know some people still working because they made other choices.
Q5: Do you know the avg time in L8 before getting to VP? I think I previously saw 5-7 years.
Average is (or was) 6 years, which is what it took me. I saw cases as fast as 3 years and as slow as 9 years (and of course, some that were as slow as never).
Q6: When you started working as an Engineer in 1993, did you ever have a long term dream to reach this position in life or it developed over time with experience?
Ha ha. I thought of managers like the pointy haired boss in Dilbert. I never thought I would even want to be in management, let alone an executive.
However, once I got a taste of working on human problems as a leader rather than technical problems as an engineer, I loved it. So I did develop some vision of this career pretty early, within say 3 or 4 years of starting my career.
Q7: Were there things beyond your control (e.g. reorgs, company priority re-alignments) that you can comment on?
Wow, so many things beyond my control.
Layoffs at most of the companies at different times (read here)
Outside economic conditions (recessions)
Bad bosses (and reorgs under them)
But there were also good things that were out of my control, and we often forget those:
I joined an online bookseller before AWS, Kindle, or Prime Video existed... and found I had joined a technology unicorn that grew 100x while I was there.
There were external setbacks, but my biggest setbacks were self inflicted. I believed that being right was all that mattered, so I was loud and abrasive in my beliefs early in my career. It cost me two jobs. Only after that did I learn that being persuasive and collaborative was a better path.
Q8: Can you comment on the 1 year stints? You seem to have several. Did you pay any penalty for those?
I did have a couple of short stints. One was only 6 months, another 14 months.
They did not hurt me because they were mixed in with sufficiently long stints, and/or I was finding jobs in a good economy at the time.
I only really recall one interview where the interviewer really questioned my past. It was at a defense contractor, so I think it mattered a lot to them. In hindsight, I think I am lucky I did not get that job, but in any case, my short stays cost me there.
Q9: Given that there are irreversible sacrifices why should one want to rise to VP or above? What is the right kind of motivation? How do you know it will be a rewarding experience for you?
I think the answer is personal. For me, I enjoyed being a part of bigger efforts and bigger decisions, as well as the challenges of scale. I also enjoyed hiring and developing the people. So basically, I enjoyed much of the work this path took.
Do you enjoy the things your path requires? If so, it is a good path. Do you not like them and you are doing too much only because you “should” to get to a goal? Poor path.
Q10: At what point does the prize stop being worth it? For eg. What stopped you from reaching for above VP?
It was my personal point where I decided, OK, I have economic security, now what have I been putting off that I really value? Time with family. Time with friends. Time to travel.
The chance to pay forward my good luck to others (posts like this, trying to help others do better than I did).
I stepped off the career track when I saw that the money was enough. There are plenty of people with more money (and I have posted about the reality of envy in the past also).
Q11: What did you, if anything, sacrifice over those 20+ years as you were "climbing" I'm curious?
I have talked about this in other places (including in my above-mentioned class). Yes, lots of sacrifices, not all of which I am sure I should have made. But, I made the best decisions I could along the way.
One reason I post a lot is that I never had access to someone like me. I could read books, and yes, I did have some good bosses and mentors, but now LinkedIn allows me to reach 100,000+ people a day with a discussion. When I started on this path, such help was just not available.
I tell people all the time that "your company will not sit by your sickbed when you are old."
Additional ideas worth considering from my LinkedIn audience:
You must love what you are going to do. If you just want the title/promotion, you are missing the point, if this is your reason, you’ve already failed. Build a good team, have an impact, and titles follow.
Do not let titles hold you back from opportunities. Several people pointed out that I went from “VP” (at a startup) to Senior Manager at Amazon, and that many people struggle in thinking “Every new role must be a better title.” High growth, strong leaders, and impact are more important.
Thanks for the content, Ethan. I have been a fan since seeing you on Devin Nash's stream years ago. I will be part of one of the "high potential" programs you mentioned here and wondering if you have any tips how to succeed in them and what to pay attention to during such a role. Currently, I am thinking networking within the company and having high "visibility" is important, but eager to hear your opinon. Thanks!
Thanks for the content, Ethan. I have been a fan since seeing you on Devin Nash's stream years ago. I will be part of one of the "high potential" programs you mentioned here and wondering if you have any tips how to succeed in them and what to pay attention to during such a role. Currently, I am thinking networking within the company and having high "visibility" is important, but eager to hear your opinon. Thanks!
Gold piece Ethan. Loved it.