The Magic Loop: How a Former Amazon VP Says You Can Earn Promotions by Helping Your Boss

Ethan Evans, a former Amazon vice president and now an executive coach, says the Magic Loop is a way to grow your career in almost any circumstance, even with a somewhat difficult manager. His guest post on Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter became the sixth most popular of more than 300 posts. Evans says he worked hard to make it simple to understand and follow.

Step one is to do your current job well, since you cannot grow if your boss wishes you were different. Step two is to ask your boss how you can help, which very few people do and which sets you apart. Step three is to do whatever they say, even if it is unglamorous maintenance work, and step four is the magic: go back and ask if there is something you can do for them that also helps you reach your goal, such as learning a new skill. Step five is simply to repeat.

Evans named it the Magic Loop because it worked so well with his audience that some people wrote asking how to turn it off, since they were in over their heads after being promoted. It works because it forms a partnership: I will help you, and I need you to help me. There are exploitative managers who will take the extra effort and give nothing back, but he says they are rare. Step four only works if you know what you want.

Rachitsky recalls that Evans pushed back when he suggested simply asking a manager how to grow. Evans says a great manager may make the formality unnecessary, but the loop is designed for people whose managers are not very good or are simply busy. Many managers mean well but get absorbed in their own work and careers, and next week drifts on for a year.

To those who ask why they have to do this, Evans says a good manager would do all those things, but not all managers are good, and the loop is in your control. He also says managers can initiate it from their side by asking about career goals and offering a partnership. He found that employees who saw him investing in them leaned in and worked harder.

As proof, he tells of an entry-level reader laid off in the UK who applied the loop, got a raise offer, took an even better job elsewhere and was promoted there too. At the other end, he describes an engineer who joined his team at Amazon as an SDE II and rose over about eight years to run an office of a couple hundred people, and later became an executive vice president at a major online bank after founding and selling a startup.

The loop works from early career to well into senior roles, though it becomes less explicit. Over time you move from asking how you can help, to suggesting what you see needs doing, to simply fixing problems and keeping your leader in the loop. Evans stresses that this advanced mode depends on trust and rapport, so a newcomer who jumps in may work on things the boss does not value.

Evans gives two reasons the loop works. First, managers are rarely offered help, and management can be a lonely job in which you feel responsible for everything, so an ally is a huge weight off. Second, there is basic social engineering: we help the people who help us, which does not need to be exploitative. Many manager relationships are oppositional, like a student trying to do the least homework needed to get a D, and that will not build a career.

Rachitsky adds that the loop forces you and your manager to name the gaps keeping you from the next level, instead of hearing them at a review. It also makes you share your goal. Evans notes that managers often assume you either want to do the same thing forever or want the career path they chose, so stating your goal clears that up.

The goal need not be promotion. Evans says he reached a point where he stopped pursuing promotion and used the loop to move into gaming, and others can use it to switch projects, join a stronger team or rebalance life. Only someone with a truly perfect job as it is, he says, would not need it.

Evans says many senior managers at roughly the L7 level get stuck for a few reasons. There is a choke point because a director may have six to eight reports, so few directors are needed, and the economy has made it worse. He recalls that at Amazon he went from managing six people to 800 over nine years, which he describes as riding an elevator that was going up.

The other cause is that the difference between senior manager and director is how you lead. You can reach senior manager by being strong in your function and getting things done, but directors and VPs succeed through influence, coordination and letting go of details. He points to Marshall Goldsmith's book *What Got You Here Won't Get You There*.

His advice is honest: some patience is required, because promotion depends both on being qualified and on the company having a role that needs that level. What you control is practicing next-level skills, taking on strategic projects and becoming more inventive, so that you are the one chosen out of the eight. He tells of a client whose two peers were let go and who received their teams. Rachitsky adds that doing the job before you have it makes leaders comfortable promoting you, and Evans says bosses have a selfish motive to promote strong people because it lets them do less of their own job.

Evans says that Bill Carr, his old boss and author of *Working Backwards*, wishes the book had been called *The Invention Machine*, since Bezos wanted Amazon to systematically out-invent others. When Evans joined, he did not think of himself as an inventor, but leadership principles like Think Big and Invent and Simplify pushed him to learn how. He now holds over 70 patents, all from his 15 years at Amazon.

His method has three parts. You need to be something of an expert in the area, you need dedicated thinking time away from devices, and the easiest path is to put together two things that already exist. His example is a patent for drone delivery in which a roofless truck drives slowly around a neighborhood while drones shuttle to and from it, an idea that came when he thought about an aircraft carrier for drones.

You do not need much time, he says: two hours once a month is enough, because one good idea can take years to express. He points to Prime and the Kindle, ideas that are decades old and still improving, and agrees with Bezos that much of invention is incremental optimization after the base idea. Prime grew from two-day to one-day to same-day shipping and added Prime Video, Music and Gaming, with Bezos's aim being to make it a no-brainer.

Evans, who says he has interviewed over 2,500 people, notes evidence that appearance and enthusiasm are the top two factors in any interview. You should show up looking interested and be enthusiastic, because people want to work with people who want to work with them. Even if you are unsure about the job, he says, you still want the offer, so lean in.

Beyond that, especially at higher levels, candidates describe what they did but not why it mattered. Leaders hire someone because they have a problem or need, so show how you made a difference to the business or customers; that makes you more of a leader than a worker, and a leader need not be a people manager. For video interviews he adds that you should give full dedication: no calls from a car, keep the camera on, use eye contact and gestures, and prepare mostly with sleep and coffee.

Evans recounts launching Amazon's Android-based app store about six years into his time there, when he was a director. Bezos's launch letter highlighted a Test Drive button that opened an app in a simulator in the browser. The team worked all night but it was not working at 6:00 AM, and when Bezos asked where the letter was, Evans said they were working on a few problems while privately hoping for 20 more minutes.

Bezos kept asking what problems, and when Evans mentioned a database, Bezos questioned why a database was in the design when Amazon was trying to move off Oracle to AWS. He copied Evans's boss and skip-level, and by 7:30 AM the thread was snowballing with angry replies. Evans owned the failure, committed to a specific update every hour, and so bought time one hour at a time.

Leaders on the thread then reached out privately to help, and Andy Jassy's AWS organization and CTO Werner Vogels sent principal database engineers. They found fundamental mistakes in the design and chose to give the team 500 AWS machines so the design would run anyway. The fix took all day, but the launch window for the media was missed and Bezos had little trust left, even checking the system himself over the weekend.

The following week Evans went early to a meeting with Bezos, sat next to his usual chair, and at the end Bezos asked how he was and said it must have been a hard week. They had a human conversation and Evans felt forgiven, though he still had to re-earn trust. His lesson is that flaming in email is easy while being angry face to face is hard, and two years later he was promoted to vice president.

Rachitsky sums up the lessons: admit and own the problem, prioritize and communicate, and take it offline to talk in person. Evans adds that you must work hard and fast to fix it, rotating team members home to sleep in shifts, and should not wait until Monday. On imposter syndrome, he says many people would have quit out of shame, but he was bullheaded, believed he was still a good worker and moved on.

He adds that Jeff Wilke, Bezos's number two and his skip-level, later told him that prioritizing the date over Amazon's reputation was wrong, but that at least he knew he was gambling, otherwise they would be discussing his departure. Evans only then realized he had been evaluated for firing. He says many people feel more dead in the water than they are.

To recover, Evans says he had to change from an operational cowboy who prioritizes speed to someone who fears the New York Times headline, since an Amazon outage hits every news site. He also moved away from surprise launches toward heavy beta testing, accepting leaks over broken launches. His biggest regret is that the bug came from a new graduate left unsupervised, who then left the company, and Evans wishes he had reassured him that the system failed him.

Evans explains that when Amazon merged three lists into one set of leadership principles, ownership was dropped. Jeff Wilke brought the proposed list to a group of his directors, who said ownership was missing, and Wilke told them to propose a draft. Evans suggested the line "An owner never says that's not my job," which survived into the final principle; with about one and a half million employees, he calls it probably the most impactful thing he has written.

His other favorite is bias for action, which says speed matters and many decisions are reversible. In a competitive field, he argues, being right is good but being quick is necessary, since among ten startups the ones that bet early and are right will beat you. He admits this is what got him into trouble with Bezos, so it has to be balanced, and Rachitsky notes that Bezos wants decisiveness to be the core value at Blue Origin.

Evans says he kept an email as proof of his wording but would not claim credit, and that the story shows you can influence a company far above you if your ideas are good. They also discuss other principles: Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit, and Leaders Are Right a Lot, which was rewritten to include working to disconfirm their beliefs and seeking diverse perspectives.

Evans's first contrarian view is on return to office. He notes that the first purpose-built office dates to 1726 in London, so we have had about 300 years to improve offices, while remote work is only a few years old at scale and has far more room to improve. He thinks remote work will win in the long run.

His second is doing business on a handshake. Most of his coaching clients have no NDA or contract and pay him through PayPal, and he thinks the world is too contract-driven and has lost the idea of your word being your bond. He accepts that he will occasionally get burned, but says constant suspicion has a high cost, and Rachitsky notes that Sam Altman has a similar philosophy.

In the lightning round he recommends *Decisive* by Chip and Dan Heath, *Leadership and Self-Deception* from the Arbinger Institute, and *The Almanack of Naval Ravikant*. His favorite interview question asks about a time the candidate disagreed with management, because he wants people with backbone, and his life motto is "To whom much has been given, from him much will be required." He does his writing on LinkedIn and teaches a course called Stuck at Senior Manager.