Design Experiments to Measure Promotion Scheduling Impact
Scenario
A food delivery marketplace is releasing flexible promotion scheduling (e.g., time-of-day deals, merchant-funded discounts, and broader eligibility). Merchants in treatment would be able to set up scheduled promos; control merchants continue with current tooling.
Question
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What business goals and success metrics should be set for this feature?
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How would you design and monitor an experiment to assess its impact?
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How would you use pre-period data when interpreting results?
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Would you ramp 80/20 or 50/50? Why?
Constraints & Assumptions
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Preserve the scope, facts, inputs, and requested outputs from the prompt above.
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If the prompt leaves a detail unspecified, state a reasonable assumption before relying on it.
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Keep the answer interview-ready: concise enough to present, but concrete enough to implement or evaluate.
Clarifying Questions to Ask
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Clarify the business objective, unit of analysis, time window, exposure definition, and primary metric.
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State assumptions about instrumentation, randomization, sample size, and data quality.
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Separate descriptive analysis from causal claims.
What a Strong Answer Covers
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A metric framework with primary, guardrail, and diagnostic metrics.
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A credible analysis or experiment design with clear assumptions and bias checks.
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SQL/statistical logic for segmentation, variance, confidence, and data validation where relevant.
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An actionable recommendation that explains trade-offs and next steps.
Follow-up Questions
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What sanity checks would you run before trusting the result?
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How would you handle novelty effects, seasonality, or selection bias?
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What decision would you make if metrics disagree?