Question: Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond the call of duty for a customer. Why did you take the action you did? What was the outcome?

• Source: Amazon

• Advice: Start by defining above and beyond clearly in your introclusion. Most candidates pick a story and start telling it without detailing why they think the actions were above and beyond. This leads to a flat answer that sounds like one is simply doing the PM job.

• My (working) Answers: When working at Google, I was responsible for helping a customer migrate off of an old platform to the new one. They had dragged their feet out of fear, it was just to overwhelming to handle. I worked backwards from the launch date and provided weekly support to break down roadblocks. Or I could look ot my time at Yelp when I sat down with a customer and asked them to describe their current process. I documented all the pain points and then made my team pivot to solve his use case. I did this because I could see they were the bottleneck because the process was so painful. It was the right thing to do for them and the entire organization.

This is one of 7 standard customer obsession questions Amazon asks. Amazon is looking for leaders who 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. Look for stories where you worked backwards from the ideal state, you worked vigorously or you did something that earned trust with your customer.

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