Growth & Business Optimization Topics
Growth strategies, experimentation frameworks, and business optimization. Includes A/B testing, conversion optimization, and growth playbooks.
Experimentation and Product Validation
Designing and interpreting experiments and validation strategies to test product hypotheses. Includes hypothesis formulation, experimental design, sample sizing considerations, metrics selection, interpreting results and statistical uncertainty, and avoiding common pitfalls such as peeking and multiple hypothesis testing. Also covers qualitative validation methods such as interviews and pilots, and using a mix of methods to validate product ideas before scaling.
Experimentation Strategy and Advanced Designs
When and how to use advanced experimental methods and how to prioritize experiments to maximize learning and business impact. Candidates should understand factorial and multivariate designs interaction effects blocking and stratification sequential testing and adaptive designs and the trade offs between running many factors at once versus sequential A and B tests in terms of speed power and interpretability. The topic includes Bayesian and frequentist analysis choices techniques for detecting heterogeneous treatment effects and methods to control for multiple comparisons. At the strategy level candidates should be able to estimate expected impact effort confidence and reach for proposed experiments apply prioritization frameworks to select experiments and reason about parallelization limits resource constraints tooling and monitoring. Candidates should also be able to communicate complex experimental results recommend staged follow ups and design experiments to answer higher order questions about interactions and heterogeneity.
Yield Optimization & Constraint-Based Modeling
Techniques for optimizing yield and performance under constraints using constraint-based modeling, including linear programming, integer programming, and related optimization methods, applied to operations, manufacturing, supply chain, and product optimization.
Feature Success Measurement
Focuses on measuring the impact of a single feature or product change. Key skills include defining a primary success metric, selecting secondary and guardrail metrics to detect negative side effects, planning measurement windows that account for ramp up and stabilization, segmenting users to detect differential impacts, designing experiments or observational analyses, and creating dashboards and reports for monitoring. Also covers rollout strategies, conversion and funnel metrics related to the feature, and criteria for declaring success or rollback.
Statistical Rigor & Avoiding Common Pitfalls
Demonstrate deep understanding of statistical concepts: power analysis, sample size calculation, significance levels, confidence intervals, effect sizes, Type I and II errors. Discuss common mistakes in test interpretation: peeking bias (checking results too early), multiple comparison problem, regression to the mean, selection bias, and Simpson's Paradox. Discuss how you've implemented safeguards against these pitfalls in your testing processes. Provide examples of times you've caught flawed analyses or avoided incorrect conclusions.
Experiment Design and Execution
Covers end to end design and execution of experiments and A B tests, including identifying high value hypotheses, defining treatment variants and control, ensuring valid randomization, defining primary and guardrail metrics, calculating sample size and statistical power, instrumenting events, running analyses and interpreting results, and deciding on rollout or rollback. Also includes building testing infrastructure, establishing organizational best practices for experimentation, communicating learnings, and discussing both successful and failed tests and their impact on product decisions.
Hypothesis and Test Planning
End to end practice of generating clear testable hypotheses and designing experiments to validate them. Candidates should be able to structure hypotheses using if change then expected outcome because reasoning ground hypotheses in data or qualitative research and distinguish hypotheses from guesses. They should translate hypotheses into experimental variants and choose the appropriate experiment type such as A and B tests multivariate designs or staged rollouts. Core skills include defining primary and guardrail metrics that map to business goals selecting target segments and control groups calculating sample size and duration driven by statistical power and minimum detectable effect and specifying analysis plans and stopping rules. Candidates should be able to pre register plans where appropriate estimate implementation effort and expected impact specify decision rules for scaling or abandoning variants and describe iteration and follow up analyses while avoiding common pitfalls such as peeking and selection bias.
A and B Test Design
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.
Metrics Selection and Diagnostic Interpretation
Addresses how to choose appropriate metrics and how to interpret and diagnose metric changes. Includes selecting primary and secondary metrics for experiments and initiatives, balancing leading indicators against lagging indicators, avoiding metric gaming, and handling conflicting signals when different metrics move in different directions. Also covers anomaly detection and root cause diagnosis: given a metric change, enumerate potential causes, propose investigative steps, identify supporting diagnostic metrics or logs, design quick experiments or data queries to validate hypotheses, and recommend remedial actions. Communication of nuanced or inconclusive results to non technical stakeholders is also emphasized.