Behavioral & Leadership: End-to-End Analytics Project Under Ambiguity and Time Pressure

Context

You are a Data Scientist interviewing for a technical screen focused on behavioral and leadership competencies. Assume a two‑sided marketplace environment where Growth and Marketplace Health can be in tension (e.g., demand stimulation vs. supply reliability).

Prompt

Walk through a recent analytics project you led end-to-end with ambiguous goals and tight timelines. Address the following:

1. Situation/Task
   • Business context and decision deadline.
   • Define what success meant in measurable terms (primary KPI and guardrails).
2. Action
   • How you scoped the problem amid ambiguity and aligned on hypotheses.
   • How you prioritized stakeholders with conflicting objectives (e.g., Growth vs. Marketplace Health) and negotiated trade-offs.
   • One instance where you pushed back on a senior stakeholder’s request for a misleading metric: what was misleading, what evidence you used, and how you communicated.
3. Result
   • Concrete impact with numbers (e.g., +X% completion, −Y% cancellations, TTR reduced by Z days).
   • How you ensured reproducibility and handoff (docs, dashboards, alerts, pipelines).
4. Reflection
   • One decision you would change in hindsight and why.
   • The early signal that would have prompted the change sooner.
5. Follow-up
   • If you had to re-run the project as a 2-week sprint starting today, provide a day-by-day milestone plan.
   • Specify interim leading indicators you’d track to de-risk the outcome.