Define metrics for high-quality notifications
Company: Meta
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: Hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
## Context
You are a Data Scientist partnering with a product team at Facebook/Meta that owns push/in-app notifications.
The team’s goal is to **send fewer but higher-quality notifications**—i.e., notifications that users find relevant and that improve long-term product outcomes—while avoiding spammy experiences.
Assume you can instrument notification events (send, deliver, open/click, dismiss, mute/disable notifications, uninstall), downstream engagement (sessions, time spent, content actions), and longer-term outcomes (retention). You also have user/device attributes and can join events by `user_id` and time.
## Part A — “High-quality” notification definition
1. **What data would you look at** to determine whether notifications are “high-quality” (include both immediate and long-term signals, and consider segmentation)?
2. Propose **one primary success metric** to optimize notification quality, plus **diagnostic metrics** and **guardrails**. Clearly define each metric.
## Part B — Testing a geographic notification feature
The team wants to test a new feature: **geographic/nearby-event notifications** (e.g., “A concert is happening near you tonight”).
1. Design an **experiment/measurement plan** to evaluate success (treatment/control definition, unit of randomization, duration).
2. What are the key **threats to validity** (e.g., network effects/interference, novelty, seasonality, selection into location sharing), and how would you mitigate them?
3. What would you conclude and recommend if short-term engagement improves but opt-outs/mutes also increase?
Provide your reasoning and any assumptions you need to make.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in metric design, causal experimentation, instrumentation, segmentation, and trade-off analysis between short-term engagement and long-term retention, as well as reasoning about threats to validity like interference and selection bias.