From TPM to technical advisor: How Amazon's culture fueled my nontraditional career journey

In 2012, I was facing a professional fork in the road. As a principal TPM, I was ready for the next challenge, but a more senior TPM role didn’t exist and there wasn’t an obvious path. Most TPMs at this stage in their career transitioned to software development managers since that was a clearly defined career path, but my passion was rooted in the technical complexity of being a TPM. I saw the need for more senior technologist roles to support Amazon’s growth, so I stayed in my role, doing what I loved.

At Amazon, you own your own career growth. I worked with my manager to set both program-related and personal goals for the year. I also kept track of the work I delivered and how that work demonstrated growth in my role and my command of the Amazon Leadership Principles. Over time, through this collaboration with my manager and demonstrating a track record of high performance and measurable impact, I became one of the first two Amazonians from a TPM background to reach the director level as an individual contributor.

Five years later, I was promoted from senior principal technologist to vice president and distinguished engineer at AWS, becoming the first person from the TPM job family to be promoted to that role. I have really grown with the company in many ways and I credit Amazon’s culture, which empowers employees to drive their own career growth, as a key factor in my success.  

At Amazon and AWS, we often talk about the need to “deal with ambiguity” in the work we do. The work we do, at the scale we are doing it, is often not defined because we are charting new territory. As a result, we need to figure out how, and what, we are going to deliver without a previously defined path.

The ambiguity in the work that I do and delivering impact for customers are what have kept my roles exciting. I’ve been able to continuously learn and grow as a leader and technologist, and this customer-first mindset keeps me feeling challenged, all of which brings me an extraordinary sense of personal accomplishment.

For me, dealing with ambiguity starts with our working backwards process, understanding the customer, and analyzing if we are trying to deliver what that customer actually needs. The working backwards process sets us up for success right out of the gate. It ensures we’re putting our customers’ needs first, which leads us to create meaningful solutions for their businesses and lives. When you’re working in an ambiguous and undefined role, one of the most important ways to deliver clarity in your work is through this process.

One of the many things I love about Amazon is how we also treat internal teams as customers. For example, one of the programs I owned early in my Amazon career was the digital transformation of the Amazon.com website to the AWS cloud. I needed to work closely with developers across Amazon to understand what they needed and what they were experiencing. This enabled me to work backwards to both develop the correct integrations into our existing tooling to meet them where they were, and work with AWS on a feature request that helped Amazon.com with its transformation.

Something that is very important to me when I own a program is overall reduction in effort and, where possible, making it seamless for developers to enable the work required for the program. This involves using the Amazon Leadership Principle of Invent and Simplify. This was true for the Amazon.com migration to AWS and has been a theme of the work I’ve done at Amazon.

I’m passionate about reducing “undifferentiated work” from developers—in other words, the repetitive work that can be centralized and/or automated—so they can focus on the creative aspects of their work. For me, this connects into Customer Obsession because removing undifferentiated work allows my internal customers, the developers, to spend more time innovating for our external customers.

Up until this year, my main focus has been to enable my internal customers to innovate. As I’ve helped engineers accelerate their work for AWS customers, it was rare for me to personally interface with AWS customers. As technical advisor, I’m getting new visibility and better understanding of AWS customers and their end-to-end needs. This suits me as I enjoy collaborating with teams, diving deep to understand the technology that’s needed, and removing the blockers that stand in the way of delivering our best work. I look forward to combining the work I did previously with the new perspectives I’ll gain in the technical advisor role to better serve our customers.

For anyone considering joining Amazon or AWS, or looking to grow professionally in any role or company, I encourage you to embrace ambiguity and the working backwards process. When you’re delivering solutions for your customers, you’ll find that as you build the right products and programs, you’ll also develop your career in exciting new ways.

Laura Grit has been at Amazon since December 2007. She is the Technical Advisor to Adam Selipsky, AWS CEO. Laura specializes in the areas of cloud infrastructure efficiency, large scale enterprise migration to the cloud, resiliency in application architecture, and devops productivity. In addition to other initiatives, prior to joining AWS in 2012, Laura led the Amazon.com migration from on-premises data centers to AWS services. Laura is a passionate advocate for growing and developing technical leadership among engineering populations. Laura previously helped lead the Amazon Women in Engineering affinity group, for which she is now an Executive Sponsor, and was also a leader of the Amazon Principal Engineer Community. Prior to joining Amazon, Laura earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Duke University, where she specialized in resource allocation for distributed virtual computing environments.