January 5: The Amazon Promotion Document

In Amazon’s writing culture, managers use facts to explain an employee’s promotion readiness.

Source: The Writer’s Kitchen
Published: December 2021

The Amazon Promotion Document

In Amazon’s writing culture, managers use facts to explain an employee’s promotion readiness. The majority of the promo doc focuses on 5–7 success stories that align the employee’s impact with their next career level. Like the recommended structure for answering a question in Amazon’s interviews, these stories may follow the STAR format: situation, task, action, and result.

Ways to define the impact of your work

Impact evaluation: Cost savings, revenue generation
Example: Increased college students subscribing to Amazon Prime by $19 million per year.

Impact evaluation: Quantify volume, size, scale
Example: Increased the usage of Amazon Day delivery by 300,000 orders per day.

Impact evaluation: Percentage change, year-over-year improvements
Example: Improved Amazon Care patient satisfaction by 8% quarter-over-quarter.

Impact evaluation: Time to market, implementation time, time savings
Example: Reduced the average wait time of trucks at sort centers by 6 minutes per week.

Impact evaluation: Quality improvements
Example: Eliminated entries in the database marked as “unknown” that prevented issues from being identified and resolved.