Why I'm Leaving Amazon After 5 Years

Despite great success there, I'm leaving to pursue a new passion: helping you grow your career.

For many, being a Sr. Product Manager at Amazon is their dream job. Full ownership over a large product, high pay and good growth opportunities are the things that make a great career that almost anyone would be happy with, especially having landed that job title at 24. But for me, it always felt like there was something more.

My Career Journey and How I Became the Youngest Sr. PMT at Amazon

I attended the University of Michigan for a degree in Materials Science Engineering, originally dreaming of revolutionizing sports equipment, but I absolutely dreaded every MSE-related internship I had. I wasn’t meant to be cooped up in a lab looking at material samples, I wanted to work with others and coach people to grow. When I graduated in 2020 during the pandemic, I didn’t have a ton of amazing job offers like a lot of my peers. My offer from Accenture had been rescinded, I had a post-grad internship offer with Toyota, and an offer as a warehouse manager at Amazon. Despite the position being far from glamorous, I went with Amazon and moved my things to Charlotte, North Carolina to become an entry-level (L4) Area Manager.

On the surface, the work was grueling. Twelve hour shifts with no breaks, where lunch was often a sandwich from the vending machine that I ate on the shop floor when no one was looking. Employees that were disgruntled with life and didn’t want to take orders from some 21-year old kid. The system that assigned people to work stations didn’t function, so at the start of every day the entire 100+ person department would come right up to me for me to manually pick a place for them to work. Social distancing? Never heard of her. But despite this, I was enamored with how the place worked. I loved the fast-paced, highly social energy of the building and the complexity of all of the systems that made the place work.

My goal was to become a Project Manager, and so over the next 6 months I found ways to create process improvement projects within my warehouse, which got me promoted from L4 to L5. I then used this portfolio of work to applied and land a position as a Project Manager in Global Engineering Services, Amazon’s division that builds all of the warehouses worldwide. During this time, I shifted my goal towards Product Management. I started spending evenings and weekends working teaching myself software skills, taking certification courses like PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner and AWS Cloud Practitioner to learn the role. I also networked heavily with people in technical roles, including the person who ran the technical team of my division.

I wanted to become a Product Manager so badly. At the time, I interviewed and landed another Program Manager role at Amazon and I remember asking the hiring manager if there was any way he could make me a product manager, even if informally. After hearing no, I went back to my current director and asked if I could join the technical team in any capacity, to which they said yes and brought me on as a Program Manager owning several software tools. No pay increase or title change guaranteed, just the chance to do the work and earn my stripes, but that’s all I needed.

Over the next year, I did a hybrid of Technical Program Manager (execution focused) and Product Manager (strategy) work and was promoted to Senior Project Manager. I worked extremely long hours both to complete my job and quickly build the skills I knew I would need to eventually reach the PMT title. At Amazon, moving from a non-technical role to a technical one requires a review of your work samples and a test of your technical skills, usually in the form of an interview. I continued to work with my manager to set this up and in June of 2023, I passed the examination, marking my official transition to Sr. Product Manager - Technical.

The remaining two years of my career were filled with more twists and turns, from managing a tech team as an L6 PMT, to re-orgs that led me to manage other PMs before eventually taking on the roadmap for the full portfolio of tools. I thrived in chaos because I simply got things done and knew how to right the ship when stuff hits the fan.

Leaving Amazon and What’s Next

From July of this year, I’ll be starting a new company called Nayru that uses AI to create customized learning plans for Product Managers and other tech employees. Why am I leaving? I believe there is currently a generational opportunity to change the world using AI, and I couldn’t sit on the sidelines any longer. I’ve always wanted to push technology forward and run my own business, and I felt that I had gained enough experience in my Amazon career while still being young enough to make the leap and afford the risk.

Nayru’s hypothesis is two-fold:

1. Current online edtech solutions aren’t effective because they only give you a piece of the equation. Courses like LinkedIn Learning give you small subject snippets but don’t give you enough structure to actually reach your desired role or promotion. There is an opportunity for edtech solutions to use AI to personalize curriculum based on the learner’s unique experiences and create an end to end plan for them to get to their dream job.

2. Education as a whole will change drastically with AI. Humans have traditionally learned via lecture formats and have spent the first 21-30 years of their life developing theoretical knowledge that then usually doesn’t translate to practical job skills. Only once people actually start performing the job do they actually build proficiency. With AI Agents continuing to evolve and replace entry-level roles, this massive time sink must be resolved for people to stay relevant in the job market in the future. Humans’ early years must be spent on real job experiences so that they enter the job market with advanced proficiency, while still developing the critical thinking skills that make humans human. This used to be called apprenticeship in labor roles, but has essentially disappeared in American knowledge work sectors. That’s why my company Nayru is focusing on creating job simulation experiences using AI agents, so that humans can learn faster and grow alongside AI, rather than being left behind.

My Unpopular Opinions and Keys to Career Success

Here’s some advice that helped me in my Amazon career.

Disclaimer: This helped me become the youngest Sr. PMT at Amazon when I was 24 and led me to lead product and AI strategy for the full suite of software used to build almost every Amazon warehouse around the world by 26, but results may vary.

• People who only “do what’s in their job description” stagnate in their career. Companies promote you not as a reward for working well, but because you show the potential to perform at the next level. This often means you’re doing work that’s outside of your job title in order to get the next one. Even in my last several months at Amazon, I was coding features, designing and doing TPM work to be more well rounded and prep for becoming a founder.

• I’m not a genius by any means. In fact my college GPA was atrocious. I just continuously worked very hard and very long hours, was smart about the moves I made and thus was able to create luck and opportunities.

• Knowing how to speak well is an amazing career booster. I was a terrible public speaker growing up, but once I got good it became one of the keys to out-performing people 5-25 years older than me.

• Your career is your responsibility to manage. I wrote down every interesting thing I did in my career throughout my entire 5 years at Amazon. Nothing crazy, just a single bullet point on a word doc every couple of weeks, but when it came time to vouch for promotions I had plenty of ammo.

• Your relationship with your manager will make or break you. Most roles I’ve been in, my manager has looked at me as a confidant and someone they could vent to or bounce ideas off of. If you stay on top of your work and proactively provide regular updates on things going good or bad, you’ll already be ahead of the competition.

Closing Notes

Despite my success thus far and optimism for the future, I remain humble about how immensely difficult it is to grow a successful company. In my final 1:1 with him, my director gave me several pieces of advice, one of which was “what got you here won’t get you there,” and he’s right. What we set out to accomplish is no small feat, and it will require an immense amount of work, luck, tact and resilience.

What I have going for me is that I work non-stop until my business succeeds or dies trying. This isn’t an empty platitude; many times over the past several years my girlfriend, friends and family have pleaded with me to work less as I spent countless hours on the computer. And while I know that hard work alone won’t get me where I want to go, it got me here to a life I’m very grateful for, and so I have no reason to stop. And so, with that, I embark on my next adventure of helping as many of you as possible, and I look forward to earning the right to do so every day.