Building the Plane While Flying It - Preeti Woods - Hiring Happy Hour - Episode # 016
"Ultimately we worked hard. We accomplished something big and now our customers are truly delighted by it." - Preeti Woods
What does it actually take to build a hiring system from scratch, launch it during COVID, and hit 1.3 million hires in a single year? In this episode of Hiring Happy Hour, Nicole sits down with her friend and former implementation partner Preeti Woods, Senior Product Manager at Amazon Web Services, to unpack the real story behind deploying SmartRecruiters to 3,000+ Amazon DSPs across 14+ countries, including the moment a UAT crisis forced a full pivot that changed the product forever. This conversation is equal parts technical, human, and deeply honest about what it means to build something that actually works when the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Takeaways:
Passion and belief in the “why” aren’t soft skills, they’re load-bearing. Knowing why your work matters and who it ultimately serves is what keeps teams moving when timelines tighten and decisions get hard.
Speed is an asset until it isn’t. When UAT revealed a fundamental flaw in their deployment model, slowing down to pivot correctly was the only move… and it paid off.
Your customer’s customer matters. Preeti kept candidates and DSP owners at the center of every product decision, not just internal stakeholders, and that lens shaped a better outcome at every turn.
Build relationships with your vendors the way you’d build them with your team. Transparency and trust between Amazon and SmartRecruiters made an impossible pivot possible in under a month.
Outcome-oriented leadership beats micromanagement every time. Whether it’s four days or six, remote or in-office, Preeti’s standard is simple: are you delivering?
Don’t underestimate what one person with clarity can drive. Preeti started as a team of one and within months was coordinating a product launch that set new Amazon records.
The hardest moments make the best case studies. The willingness to write a pivot doc, convince leadership, and take a risk is often where real transformation begins.
Quote of the Show:
“Ultimately we worked hard. We accomplished something big and now our customers are truly delighted by it.” - Preeti Woods
Links:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/preetiwoods
Website: https://aws.amazon.com/
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