Problem Definition and Framing Questions

Covers the skills and practices used to clarify, diagnose, and scope ambiguous business or product problems into actionable problem statements before proposing solutions. Candidates should demonstrate structured and insightful clarifying questions to understand business context, current and desired states, target users and user needs, success metrics and desired outcomes, constraints such as budget, timeline, technical dependencies, and compliance, stakeholder perspectives, and existing performance baselines. Includes separating symptoms from root causes, surfacing and testing hypotheses, identifying data to collect and analyze, performing root cause analysis, breaking complex problems into prioritized subproblems, and defining acceptance criteria and next steps or experiments to reduce uncertainty. Encompasses discovery techniques and basic user research to surface user pain points and opportunities, requirements scoping including scope boundaries, risks and trade offs, and the ability to write a concise problem statement in your own words. At senior levels also assess strategic framing, avoiding premature solutions, aligning stakeholders, and presenting an executive narrative that links diagnosis to measurable outcomes and implementation trade offs; for junior candidates emphasize curiosity, systematic thinking, and the ability to prioritize information needs rather than jumping to implementation.

HardTechnical

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Given noisy metrics and multiple confounders, design a causal analysis to estimate the effect of a marketing campaign on 6-month customer lifetime value. Describe identification strategies (e.g., difference-in-differences, propensity scores, instrumental variables), required data granularity, robustness checks, and limitations of each approach.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Two internal stakeholders disagree: Growth wants weekly DAU growth; Finance wants higher average revenue per user. As a data analyst, how would you reframe the problem to identify shared objectives, align metrics, and propose a measurement approach that reveals trade-offs between these goals?

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Case study: For the goal 'reduce churn by 10% in 6 months', write a concise problem statement, propose three testable hypotheses linking product changes to churn, outline the data you would need to test each hypothesis, and define acceptance criteria for success.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

When given an ambiguous request and limited time, describe a structured approach to prioritize what information you need first. Outline at least five specific data points or quick analyses you would seek and explain the rationale and ordering for gathering them.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Explain how to use counterfactual models such as synthetic control and difference-in-differences (DID) for product diagnosis. For each method, describe core assumptions, data requirements, potential pitfalls, and give a short product example where that method would be the preferred approach.

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