Investigate Pop-up Impact on Partner Referral Conversions
Company: DoorDash
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
##### Scenario
Partner-referral channel suddenly shows a sharp fall in first-time purchasers after a new splash pop-up asking visitors to download the mobile app was launched.
##### Question
How would you investigate and confirm that the pop-up caused the drop in conversions from partner links? Assuming online traffic is unchanged, how would you quantify the trade-off between app-download uplift and lost first-purchase conversions? What metrics and experiment design would you propose to decide whether to keep, modify, or remove the pop-up?
##### Hints
Map user funnel, build pre/post or A/B test, measure incremental value of app installs vs. lost orders, control for seasonality and partner mix.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates causal inference, experimentation design, metric-driven trade-off analysis, and business-metric instrumentation skills in the analytics & experimentation domain for a data scientist role, emphasizing practical application with underlying conceptual reasoning.