Separate demand from supply for jeans

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a data scientist's ability to perform data-driven diagnostics, funnel-metric construction, quantitative decision-rule design, and experimentation planning to distinguish demand-side from supply-side constraints in a marketplace jeans category.

Separate demand from supply for jeans

Role: Data Scientist

Category: Analytics & Experimentation

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

Jeans are underperforming on a marketplace. 1) Design an analysis to diagnose whether the bottleneck is demand or supply using: CTR on jeans ads/searches, search sessions with filters applied, session time, conversion given search, conversion given filter use, and price‑band coverage. 2) Define a quantitative decision rule (with thresholds) that classifies the category as demand‑limited or supply‑limited using funnel ratios like Conversions/Searches and Filter‑Use×Low‑Conversion flags. 3) Propose follow‑up experiments or interventions for each diagnosis (e.g., better retrieval/ranking and intent capture for demand; assortment/price changes, seller tooling, or subsidized shipping for supply) and how you will measure success without cannibalizing adjacent categories.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's ability to perform data-driven diagnostics, funnel-metric construction, quantitative decision-rule design, and experimentation planning to distinguish demand-side from supply-side constraints in a marketplace jeans category.

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Oct 13, 2025, 9:49 PM
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Scenario

You are a Data Scientist at a multi-category marketplace. The Jeans category is underperforming. You must diagnose whether the primary bottleneck is demand (users not engaging) or supply (inventory/assortment/price/availability mismatches) and recommend next steps.

Assume you have logs for impressions, clicks, searches, filter events, session metrics, and orders; and that you can compute category and peer-category baselines.

Tasks

  1. Design an analysis to diagnose whether the bottleneck is demand or supply using the following signals:
    • CTR on jeans ads/search results
    • Share of search sessions with filters applied
    • Session time (search session duration)
    • Conversion given search
    • Conversion given filter use
    • Price-band coverage
  2. Define a quantitative decision rule (with thresholds) that classifies the category as demand-limited or supply-limited using funnel ratios such as Conversions/Searches and a Filter-Use × Low-Conversion flag.
  3. Propose follow-up experiments or interventions for each diagnosis and how you will measure success without cannibalizing adjacent categories (e.g., chinos/pants).
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