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Experimentation and Innovation Culture Questions

Organizational practices and operating models that promote hypothesis driven product development, continuous experimentation, innovation, and calculated risk taking. Core areas include fostering an experimentation mindset and psychological safety, balancing innovation time with delivery commitments, prioritizing and allocating resources for experiments, designing hypothesis driven and controlled experiments such as split testing, selecting and instrumenting appropriate success metrics, running fast iterations and scaling successful tests, and establishing governance, guardrails, and decision criteria for acceptable risk. Also covers conducting postmortems and learning reviews, communicating experiment learnings, measuring the impact and return on investment of innovation efforts, encouraging cross functional collaboration between product, design, and analytics, and institutionalizing learnings through training, incentives, playbooks, and processes that maintain quality while promoting rapid learning. At senior levels this includes championing experimentation across the organization, creating governance and incentive structures, and embedding experiment driven insights into roadmap and operating practices.

MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Implement a Python function compute_sample_size_for_proportions(baseline, mde, alpha=0.05, power=0.8, two_sided=True) that returns the required sample size per variant for an A/B test comparing two proportions. Use normal approximation and document assumptions. Provide O(1) time implementation (no external libs required).
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design a training and onboarding program to institutionalize experimentation best practices for ML engineers across seniority levels. Include curriculum topics, hands-on exercises, playbooks, mentoring, certification, and metrics to measure program effectiveness over 6–12 months.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Design an instrumentation pipeline to collect, process, and surface experiment telemetry for near-real-time analysis (metric latency < 5 minutes) at a scale of 10M events/day. Describe ingestion, streaming processing, deduplication, metric aggregation, storage, alerting, and how you would ensure data quality and GDPR compliance.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Describe the issues with 'peeking' at experiment results and explain robust approaches to sequential testing for online experiments (alpha spending, group sequential tests, Bayesian stopping, and always-valid p-values). Discuss trade-offs in power, speed, and operational complexity.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Propose and describe a constrained multi-armed bandit approach to accelerate rollouts while ensuring a long-term retention metric never falls below a pre-specified floor. Include algorithm choice, reward shaping, safety constraints, offline evaluation strategy, and operational monitoring.

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