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A and B Test Design Questions

Designing and running A and B tests and split tests to evaluate product and feature changes. Candidates should be able to form clear null and alternative hypotheses, select appropriate primary metrics and guardrail metrics that reflect both product goals and user safety, choose randomization and assignment strategies, and calculate sample size and test duration using power analysis and minimum detectable effect reasoning. They should understand applied statistical analysis concepts including p values confidence intervals one tailed and two tailed tests sequential monitoring and stopping rules and corrections for multiple comparisons. Practical abilities include diagnosing inconclusive or noisy experiments detecting and mitigating common biases such as peeking selection bias novelty effects seasonality instrumentation errors and network interference and deciding when experiments are appropriate versus alternative evaluation methods. Senior candidates should reason about trade offs between speed and statistical rigor plan safe rollouts and ramping define rollback plans and communicate uncertainty and business implications to technical and non technical stakeholders. For developer facing products candidates should also consider constraints such as small populations cross team effects ethical concerns and special instrumentation needs.

EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain p-values and 95% confidence intervals to a product manager using an example: an A/B test returns p = 0.03 and a 95% CI for uplift of [1.2%, 4.8%]. What do these results mean practically? How should the PM interpret statistical significance, uncertainty, and business impact?
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Provide high-level pseudocode (Python-like) for a contextual Thompson Sampling algorithm for binary rewards with user context features. Explain how to handle high-dimensional contexts and discuss scalability concerns (memory, latency, feature hashing).
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
How would you detect and mitigate selection bias and novelty effects in an experiment where traffic comes from a new marketing campaign (new users more likely to be in treatment)? Describe design choices and statistical checks you would run post-hoc.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Describe the problem of optional stopping (peeking) in A/B tests. Explain classical methods like alpha spending (O'Brien-Fleming, Pocock) and Bayesian alternatives that allow sequential monitoring. Give guidance on when to use each in a product environment.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Explain how covariate adjustment (e.g., ANCOVA or regression) can increase power in experiments. Provide a short example using pre-period engagement as a covariate and describe assumptions and pitfalls (e.g., post-treatment variables, model misspecification).

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