Who executives promote and why

Hosted by Ethan Evans and Ethan Evans AI (EthanGPT)

Thu, Jun 19, 2025

7:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

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421 students

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Stuck at Senior Manager - How to Break Through to Executive
Ethan Evans
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What you'll learn

What really matters to senior executives

The truth is executives have a stack rank. You must know "The mind of the executive" to be at the top of the list.

Why some people breakthrough and others get stuck

With so many Senior Managers, competition is high. You must know how to position yourself to stand out.

Answers from Ethan and Ethan Evans AI (EthanGPT)

We will take audience questions and run them through EthanGPT first and then Ethan will add more insight.

Why this topic matters

Many people think "If I do a great job, I will eventually get promoted." That is wrong and will cost you years of delayed career growth. Instead, you must acknowledge that promotions are a combination of delivering results, reliability, trustworthiness, relationships, and business needs.

You'll learn from

Ethan Evans

Retired Amazon Vice President; 70+ patents; led global teams of 800+

In my 15+ years at Amazon, I led global teams of 800+ and invented well-known businesses and products such as Prime Video, Amazon Video, Amazon Appstore, Merch by Amazon, Prime Gaming (formerly Twitch Prime), and Twitch Commerce.


  • Hold 70+ patents.
  • Helped advocate for and draft the Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) “Ownership” — the words, “They never say ‘that’s not my job.’” are mine.
  • 10,000+ resume reviews.
  • 2,500+ live interviews.
  • 1,000+ hires.
  • Was an Amazon Bar Raiser and Bar Raiser Core Leader, responsible for training and maintaining Amazon's group of interview outcome facilitators.


I've promoted 8 reports from Senior Manager (Amazon L7) to Director (Amazon L8), contributed to 25+ Director promotions, hired 10+ Directors internally and externally, drove the promotion of 3 engineers to Principal, and of my former reports 2 are current Amazon VPs (L10) and 5 are C-Suite outside of Amazon.


I retired from Amazon as a Vice President in September 2020 to allow me to focus on paying forward my good fortune to others.


Prior to Amazon, I spent 12 years at 3 startups.


Follow me on LinkedIn.


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