Behavioral Deep-Dive: Business Impact of a Prior Project (Technical Screen)
Context: In a Data Scientist technical screen for a large two‑sided marketplace, you will be asked to deep‑dive one prior project with quantifiable business impact. The interviewer expects clarity on problem framing, decision‑making, measurement, and stakeholder leadership.
Instructions: Select one project and cover the following in order.
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Problem and Decision
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Define the business problem and why it mattered.
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State the specific decision your work enabled (e.g., launch, iterate, pause).
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Metrics
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Name the primary metric(s) and define them precisely.
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List key guardrails/secondary metrics.
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Counterfactual and Dollar Impact
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Baseline level, observed lift/change, sample sizes, time window.
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Counterfactual logic (what would have happened otherwise).
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Quantify dollar impact; include confidence/uncertainty.
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Measurement Strategy
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Experiment vs. quasi‑experiment and why.
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Key assumptions (e.g., SUTVA/no interference, parallel trends) and how you validated them.
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Any variance‑reduction or clustering you used.
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Execution and Adoption
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Stakeholder pushback/misalignment and how you handled it.
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Risks/guardrails, kill‑switches, and how you monitored them.
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How you secured adoption and de‑risked rollout.
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Delivery Details
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Timeline by phase; major trade‑offs made.
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What failed or surprised you; what you’d do differently next time.