How to test bike delivery?
Company: DoorDash
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
You are a data scientist at a food-delivery marketplace. The company is considering launching a **bicycle courier delivery option** in selected cities.
Design a data-driven approach to evaluate this launch.
Please address the following:
1. **Why might bike delivery be worth considering?** Discuss potential business, customer, courier, and operational benefits versus existing delivery modes such as cars or scooters.
2. **What factors should be considered before launching or testing it?** Include marketplace effects, city density, delivery distance, terrain, weather, order mix, courier supply, parking, safety, regulatory constraints, and possible cannibalization of existing courier modes.
3. **What metrics would you use?** Define a north-star metric, supporting operational metrics, and guardrail metrics. Explain tradeoffs among speed, cost, fulfillment, quality, courier economics, and safety.
4. **What type of experiment would you run?** Explain the most appropriate experimentation design for a two-sided marketplace, including the unit of randomization, experiment duration, segmentation, and how you would handle interference between treatment and control.
5. **How would you decide whether to scale the launch?** Describe how you would interpret results, account for confounding factors such as weather and time of day, and make a go / no-go recommendation.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in data-driven product evaluation, experimentation design, metric selection, causal inference, and marketplace economics within the Analytics & Experimentation domain.