Design autonomous-driving experience metrics
Company: WeRide
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
You are evaluating rider experience for an autonomous-driving ride service. Suppose you have trip-level data with fields such as:
- `trip_id`, `city`, `route_type`, `distance_km`
- `planned_eta_min` from a map provider
- `actual_ride_time_min`
- `hard_brake_count`, `max_jerk`, `takeover_count`, `safety_event_flag`
- `rider_rating`, `complaint_flag`, `trip_completed_flag`
- `traffic_level`, `weather`, `time_of_day`
1. Propose a metric framework for measuring the overall rider experience of the autonomous-driving product. What would you choose as the north-star metric, and what safety, comfort, reliability, and efficiency guardrails would you track alongside it? How would you handle trade-offs between metrics and avoid a misleading single-number summary?
2. One candidate metric is `trip_time_ratio = actual_ride_time_min / planned_eta_min`. You find that this ratio is much higher than expected, suggesting poor performance. Describe how you would investigate whether the issue reflects a true product problem versus an artifact of metric definition, route mix, map-ETA bias, selection bias, or data quality problems. Be explicit about segmentations, comparisons, and follow-up analyses.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in designing a metric framework for autonomous-driving rider experience and performing diagnostic analyses on trip-level telemetry and feedback, covering north-star metric selection, safety/comfort/reliability/efficiency guardrails, and detection of map-ETA bias, route mix, selection bias, and data quality issues. It falls under Analytics & Experimentation for a Data Scientist role and is commonly asked because it probes both conceptual understanding of metric trade-offs and practical application of segmentation, diagnostics, and operational validation.