Career Growth Opportunities at Amazon

You are better off being in the 60th percentile at a high-growth company than in the 99th percentile in a low-growth environment. When a company is growing fast, opportunity comes to you. When it’s not, you spend time trying to force it. Early in my career, I worked for Procter & Gamble. It was a great company with talented leaders, but it wasn’t growing. I worked hard and earned strong feedback, but advancement was measured in decades and it was nearly impossible to contribute to the top or bottom line. Working for a well-run, large company like that is a great way to develop management best practices. It is also the best way to learn how to run and operate a great company. However, large, low-growth companies have far fewer problems and opportunities than high-growth companies. So, it doesn’t really matter how good you are; if opportunities and problems are scarce, you can’t produce much impact. Despite everyone’s good intentions, advancement is slow, and the system rewards those who have the right relationships, not those who are driving outcomes (because there are fewer outcomes to be driven). Scott Galloway once said that people unknowingly stack the odds against themselves by staying in low-growth environments. This is what I was doing at the beginning of my career. Moving to Seattle and joining a fast-growing e-commerce company (Amazon) was the best career move I could have made. It was an early-stage, high-growth company— problems and opportunities were everywhere! One of our biggest problems was deciding which problems and opportunities to tackle first and finding capable leaders to own them. If you focused on the right ones and executed well, big, meaningful results followed. At Amazon, in the Seattle HQ, I was in an environment where I had the opportunity to deliver big results. It required working hard and smart, but delivering results that could lead to rapid promotion was possible. It also meant that promotions were as apolitical as you could ask for in a large company because your results could be measured objectively. I experienced what Scott Galloway points out— you can stack the odds in your favor for career growth by orienting your career around industries, cities, and companies that are fast growing. If you find an opportunity to join a fast-growing company, in a high-growth sector in a growing city, take it.

🚀 The Amazon Innovation Tool That Rewrote My Career How I used a method that launches billion-dollar ideas to design my next role.   18 months into my role at Amazon, I was… complacent. I’d blown past my goals. But the day-to-day felt eerily familiar — the same responsibilities I’d had years earlier as a consulting partner. I didn’t want to coast. I wanted to grow. So, I treated my career like Amazon approaches a new, innovative product launch. Step 1: Think Like Amazon Amazon’s “Working Backwards” method starts with the customer — then works back to the product. In my case: I was the product. My “customers” were my future stakeholders. I asked myself: • Who do I want to serve in 3–5 years? • What can I deliver that no one else can? • How will people feel after working with me?   Step 2: Write Your  Future Press Release I wrote a PR/FAQ (“Press Release (PR) and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)”) — the same tool Amazon uses to greenlight billion-dollar ideas — but this time, it was to innovate for and bet on my career. Why a PR/FAQ? Because when you write an idea as a narrative, flaws surface fast: → Markets too small. → No clear advantage. → Too many unanswered questions. The same should apply to your career. My headline/PR? Howard Steinman Named Chief Growth Officer for Amazon Professional Services Federal Civilian Practice. The narrative spelled out: • The transformation I led. • Measurable results. • Quotes from “future” leaders about my impact.   Step 3: Build the FAQ I tackled the tough questions: • Why now? • Why me? • What are the risks? • What mechanisms ensure success?   Step 4: Prove It with “Leadership Principles” I used Amazon’s 16 Leadership Principles as proof points: • Customer Obsession: How I’d drive new impact. • Invent & Simplify: Growth models we’d never tried. • Deliver Results: Data that proved I could deliver. Step 5: Launch “Future Me” I turned it into a six-page Amazon document — no slides, just a compelling narrative. Then I pitched it to leadership. Within weeks, they approved a brand-new role. One I had literally written into existence.   Lesson: You can wait for your next role to appear — or you can write it into existence using the same innovation tools Amazon uses to launch its biggest ideas.   💡 Pro Tip: Want to try it? Start with one page: → Write your future press release. → Add the FAQs. → See what feels missing — and start building toward it.

One of the things I'm most proud of at Amazon is watching people grow into roles nobody (maybe even themselves) would have predicted. Teammates who didn't have the on-paper experience for their next role but showed the right curiosity and drive, and were given the chance to try something completely new. I've seen it happen over and over in my 20-plus years here. That's not a small thing. That's careers being built. LinkedIn just named Amazon one of their top 5 companies to grow your career for the 10th consecutive year. The list measures things like ability to advance, skills growth, and whether people from all backgrounds can thrive—and I think that's exactly what happens here. Since 2019, we've provided skills training to more than 700,000 employees. Through Career Choice, more than 300,000 have pursued entirely new career paths. And with Future Ready 2030, we're working to prepare 50 million people for the future of work. And those numbers don't even capture the thousands of people who've grown simply by raising their hand for a new challenge, and having a team around them that said go for it. Grateful to work at a company where this kind of growth is real and for the teams who make it possible. https://lnkd.in/gP7_wC7c

In the 11 years I’ve been working at Amazon, I’ve often been asked how I've grown my career here. I’ve been promoted several times, moving into a more impactful and complex roles with each move. But for me, I don’t view this as simply “climbing the corporate ladder.” It’s a term that often crops up in career advancement. Instead, I think about what a coworker once told me, that has guided me ever since: “Careers at this company are jungle gyms, not ladders. One day you’re on the monkey bars, next day you're on the swings.” Jungle gyms, not ladders…that’s stuck with me ever since! Career development is about much more than just promotions. When talking to coworkers about their own careers, I try to guide them towards their skills instead — those they have already, and ones they’d like to develop. It helps us all to take a close, hard look at our capabilities. In my case, I’m great at mental models and systems thinking — I can see something, lay it out quickly, and figure out how inputs and outputs weave together. But give me a blank slate to create a brand-new idea and I’ll struggle to do so as effortlessly. A leadership book I really admire is Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility by Patty McCord, the former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix. Her career conversations start with questions, such as “What are your strengths, what excites you, where’s the opportunity to go do them?” The book offers suggestions of how an employee might build a new skill set within their current job, rather than just waiting for a promotion. It’s a novel approach that I like to use as well. It can expand people’s horizons about their own career development. By thinking in terms of a jungle gym and not a corporate ladder, you realize how many skills there are to gain and obstacles to master on your way to growth. Climbing every which way can take you to that next level, the one you’ve been aspiring to. I'd like to leave you with a few questions that may be helpful in you defining success in your own career: 1)   If you look ahead to the next 12-18 months, what skill would you like to grow or acquire that you don't have today? 2)   What are your strengths, what excites you, and where is there an opportunity to do that?" 3)   Is being promoted the goal that’s most important to you now? If so, what would you do differently if you were promoted tomorrow? And is that something you could you start doing today, even before your actual promotion?