Exactly three months ago, I started my first Product Manager position at Amazon. As a PM, you’re expected to make data-driven decisions all the time. You have to collect, analyze and visualize multiple data points almost every single day.

One of the fascinating things about Amazon is that in order to collect the desired data — you have to meet all kinds of people. UX Designers, Software Engineers, Data Engineers, Data Scientists, User Researchers, Directors, VPs and of course, many other Product Managers. I’d like to share my insights from the first 100 meetings at Amazon.

Introductions — Meetings 1–10

“I’m X. I’m a Senior X at the X team which is part of the X organization. I’m focusing on the X of X which involves X, X, X and X.”

The first 10 meetings were actually really exciting. I got to know the people I’ll be sitting, eating, joking and meeting with every day. At this stage, I simply focused on mapping the people I’m surrounded by. I created a table similar to this:

Totally random table

I won’t lie. I didn’t learn much during the first 10 meetings. But I treated this stage as an opportunity to collect “save for later” information which might allow me to connect the dots later on. This was a smart move since the more people you meet, the faster you forget about their backgrounds/strengths and you never know when will you need them. It’s always better to keep track of who you meet and how can they be helpful in the long term.

Diving Deep — Meetings 11–30

After about 10 meetings, everything started to get complex. Introductions went from 10–15 minutes to 2–3 minutes while the context of the meetings was heavily focused on cross team work flows, how data streams between systems and general product name dropping. Having back to back meetings became difficult because I had to absorb so many details after every meeting.

At some point, I realized that even though I’m new to the company and I need to get to know people and listen to what they have to say, maybe I can extract more from each meeting by simply digging into data related to that meeting beforehand? See, there are two scenarios:

I arrive unprepared to a meeting (because I’m new and that’s ok, I guess). I listen carefully to everything the other person has to say and then I ask a few follow up questions. Most likely, I end up noting down a couple of bullet points I’ll forget the next day (I can’t save bullet points for later, it’s always hard for me to connect the dots when I read them for the second time). Before the meeting, I ask the person I’m supposed to meet with for permission to query the database or view a related dashboard (pretty straightforward right?). I narrow down my research to focus on the area of responsibility that is somehow related to the product I own. Then, I try to connect between our shared ownerships, find patterns/flaws/missing data/trends and note them down. During the actual meeting, I leverage my findings to ask meaningful questions.

In my opinion, scenario #2 is far more effective. Even though it requires more pre-work for each meeting, whenever you ask detailed and data-driven questions directly related to their work, it shows that you’ve done your homework. The other person usually respects it, regardless of how new you are in the company. In fact, a whole new and interesting conversation starts right away once the other person realizes you’re speaking the same language. From my experience, such conversations lead to a deeper understanding of how both of you can share goals, develop product roadmaps and build a long-term strategy.

Reflection — Meetings 31–40

After 30~ meetings, I understood our business, external teams and the potential synergies.

However, I felt like it is best if I reflect on my learning process by meeting some of my team members. This sounds like a simple and trivial task but it’s quite the opposite. Taking a step back and talking about your key findings with people that you trust can be very beneficial. The earlier you catch mistakes in your approach the faster you learn and improve your positioning.

In addition, this was an opportunity to connect my findings with potentially overlapping projects my team members own. This is how I found overlapping metrics and was introduced to additional point of contacts.

Collaboration — Meetings 41–80

At Amazon, we work backwards. This means that we listen to our customers, identify their pain points and improve our products accordingly. During meetings 41–80, I collaborated with stakeholders from external teams to think creatively about how might we solve customers’ pain points and improve the value proposition of our products.

Looks like MasterCard’s logo right?

What I learned in those meetings is this — the more overlapping opportunities associated with your product, the bigger its impact will be. Launching a great product is good. Launching a great product that more internal teams and external customers can benefit from is way better!

The more meeting I had with Product Managers across multiple organizations at Amazon, the more use cases I found for Amazon’s customers to enjoy the products that I own. This is simply because I had more sets of eyes looking at the product and thinking about how more customers could enjoy it.

Here is how I like to get the most out of such meeting:

According to my research, these are our customers’ pain points These are my goals and this is how they somehow help your customers get a better experience Here is a list of potential solutions providing a better customer experience, broken into complexity, time taken to implement, risks and number of teams involved Which of the above help your team provide a better customer experience and why? What would you change? Is there anything else that I missed?

Developing others — Meetings 81–100

At this stage, I felt well established in the company. Meaning, I know the teams I’m working with and am familiar with the products involved. I understand the priorities of our organization and how they connect to Amazon’s global strategy.

However, other new people started reaching out to me for the very same introduction meetings I mentioned above. All of the sudden, I became a source of knowledge. The important thing at this point is to stay humble and hungry for more knowledge and point of views.