Communicate and de-risk a non-experimental launch
Overview
This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in interpreting causal-inference results from a Synthetic Control, communicating evidence strength and residual risks to executives and skeptical partners, structuring rollout governance and rollback criteria, and managing bias control, dissent and cross-functional accountability.
Reddit
Oct 13, 2025, 9:49 PM
Data Scientist
Technical Screen
Behavioral & Leadership
0
0
Decision-to-Launch Plan After a Synthetic Control Result
Context
You are a data scientist who used a Synthetic Control method to estimate the causal impact of a product change and obtained a positive effect. You must recommend whether to launch and convince both executives and skeptical partners.
Tasks
- Communicate evidence strength, residual risks, and key assumptions to executives and skeptical stakeholders.
- Propose a staged rollout plan, including:
- Kill-switches
- Guardrail SLAs
- Ownership for real-time monitoring
- Define explicit rollback criteria and draft a pre-committed decision memo structure covering:
- Problem
- Stakes
- Method
- Diagnostics
- Results
- Sensitivity analyses
- Risks
- Decision thresholds
- Contingency plan
- Sign-offs
- Describe how you will handle dissent (e.g., legal, infra), prevent p-hacking/confirmation bias, and structure a post-launch review that could reverse the decision if guardrails regress.
Solution
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