How I Worked With 11 Managers in 7 Years at Amazon

• Sai Chiligireddy has worked with nearly a dozen managers at Amazon.
• The engineering manager once struggled with his performance rating after working under three managers.
• He advises documenting achievements and preparing for meetings to build trust quickly.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sai Chiligireddy, an engineering manager at Amazon’s Seattle office. It has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his employment history.

Amazon was one of my first jobs out of college, and I landed it in 2017 after a year of working at Juniper Networks.

In the last seven years, I have worked with 11 managers — partly due to my bosses switching teams and companies, but also because I have asked to move teams when I stopped seeing growth opportunities or when I realized feedback on my performance was vague.

The first couple of times, I was worried about how frequent manager changes would impact my career growth, and the kind of projects I would get. But it got better during the later switches when I learned to communicate my goals better.

Here are four actions I took to ensure that my transitions between managers were smooth and helped me earn their trust. These pointers helped me stand out and grow fast.

1. Own your career

I have always approached my career with the mindset that I am responsible for it and my manager is a facilitator. That mental mode ensures I am communicating before I am asked to and seeking guidance from people beyond my immediate manager.

I have a habit of spending about two hours each month to reach out to multiple managers at Amazon to ask about how they grow in their careers and get feedback on how I could do things differently.

2. Document everything

I maintain a brag sheet with a log of all my achievements and summaries of all the projects I worked on, including the feedback from my previous managers and team leads and any stakeholders. I set 30 to 45 minutes aside every week or two weeks to make sure I am not missing anything.

There’s a lot of mobility in tech. If people you worked with in the past year leave, there is nobody to vouch for your work. My performance rating suffered once when I worked under three managers who all had different perceptions of what I worked on, and I didn’t take any active steps to rectify it.

I share this document with my all of my new managers so they have my track record on hand and have context on all of my current projects.

3. Prepare for one-on-ones

When I first started my career, I used to wing one-on-one meetings with my managers. I got very little out of these meetings.

I began taking the initiative to set up introductory conversations with all my new managers, where I share my short-term and long-term goals. I also share the brag document I keep in this call to give them an overview of where I am with my career and what my current projects are.

After that first meeting, I switched to a different format for the rest of our sessions. I borrowed from a book called “The Art of Meeting with Your Manager” and broke my meetings into six sections. I tweak this according to different managers and their preferences.

1. Icebreaker: To ease into conversation.
2. Employee section: I share recent contributions my manager might not have on their radar, challenges I faced, and updates on discussions I have had with others in my team.
3. Manager section: I proactively ask for feedback.
4. Development and growth: We discuss where I stand currently and brainstorm ideas and projects to make sure I am filling those gaps to meet the criteria for the next employee level.
5. Align priorities: We discuss what I should work on immediately.
6. Action items: My manager and I both note down our action items for the next meeting and follow-up on any action items from the previous meeting.

4. Divide and conquer

As I grew in my career, I started taking on more leadership responsibilities. I began supporting new engineers on my team through one-on-ones and set up Slack channels where they could ask for help.

Collaboration with other teams definitely changed. My manager and I divided and conquered. I would take the ownership of five to six teams and my manager would handle three to four.

I started trying to see myself as a support system for my manager instead of someone just working under them.