Data Science & Analytics Topics
Statistical analysis, data analytics, big data technologies, and data visualization. Covers statistical methods, exploratory analysis, and data storytelling.
Attribution Modeling and Multi Touch Attribution
Covers the theory and practice of assigning credit for conversions across marketing touchpoints. Candidates should know single touch models such as first touch and last touch, deterministic multi touch models like linear and time decay, and algorithmic or data driven models that use statistical or machine learning techniques. Discuss the pros and cons of each approach including bias introduced by simple models, the data and engineering requirements for algorithmic models, and trade offs between interpretability and accuracy. Topics include model selection aligned to business questions, dealing with long purchase cycles, cross device and cross channel journeys, limitations of deterministic attribution, approaches to model validation, and how attribution differs from causal incrementality testing.
Metrics Analysis and Data Driven Problem Solving
Skills for using quantitative metrics to diagnose and solve product or support problems. Candidates should be able to identify relevant key performance indicators such as customer satisfaction, response time, resolution rate, and first contact resolution, detect anomalies and trends, formulate and prioritize hypotheses about root causes, design experiments and controlled tests to validate hypotheses, perform cohort and time series analysis, evaluate statistical significance and practical impact, and implement and monitor data backed solutions. This also includes instrumentation and data collection best practices, dashboarding and visualization to surface insights, trade off analysis when balancing multiple metrics, and communicating findings and recommended changes to cross functional stakeholders.
Audience Segmentation and Cohorts
Covers methods for dividing users or consumers into meaningful segments and analyzing their behavior over time using cohort analysis. Candidates should be able to choose segmentation dimensions such as demographics, acquisition channel, product usage, geography, device, or behavioral attributes, and justify those choices for a given business question. They should know how to design cohort analyses to measure retention, churn, lifetime value, and conversion funnels, and how to avoid common pitfalls such as Simpson's Paradox and survivorship bias. This topic also includes deriving behavioral insights to inform personalization, content and product strategy, marketing targeting, and persona development, as well as identifying underserved or high value segments. Expect discussion of relevant metrics, data requirements and quality considerations, approaches to visualization and interpretation, and typical tools and techniques used in analytics and experimentation to validate segment driven hypotheses.
Dashboard and Data Visualization Design
Principles and practices for designing, prototyping, and implementing visual artifacts and interactive dashboards that surface insights and support decision making. Topics include information architecture and layout, chart and visual encoding selection for comparisons trends distributions and relationships, annotation and labeling, effective use of color and white space, and trade offs between overview and detail. The topic covers interactive patterns such as filters drill downs tooltips and bookmarks and decision frameworks for when interactivity adds user value versus complexity. It also encompasses translating analytic questions into metrics grouping related measures, wireframing and prototyping, performance and data latency considerations for large data sets, accessibility and mobile responsiveness, data integrity and maintenance, and how statistical concepts such as statistical significance confidence intervals and effect sizes influence visualization choices.
A/B Test Results Analysis
Learn to analyze results from A/B tests and experiments. Understand key statistics: sample size, statistical significance, confidence intervals, and p-values at a practical level (not deep theory). Practice interpreting test results: 'Is this difference real or just noise?' Learn common mistakes: stopping tests early, p-hacking, and running too many tests simultaneously.
Data Storytelling and Insight Communication
Skills for converting quantitative and qualitative analysis into a clear, persuasive narrative that guides stakeholders from findings to action. This includes leading with the headline insight, defining the business question, selecting the most relevant metrics and visual evidence, and structuring a concise story that explains what happened, why it happened, and what the recommended next steps are. Candidates should demonstrate tailoring of language and technical depth for diverse audiences from engineers to product managers to executives, summarizing trade offs and uncertainty in plain language, distinguishing correlation from causation, proposing follow up experiments or investigations, and producing concise executive summaries and status reports with an appropriate cadence. Interviewers evaluate the ability to persuade and align cross functional partners, answer questions about data validity and methodology, synthesize qualitative signals with quantitative results, and adapt presentation format and level of detail to the decision maker.
Data Analysis and Insight Generation
Ability to convert raw data into clear, evidence based business insights and prioritized recommendations. Candidates should demonstrate end to end analytical thinking including data cleaning and validation, exploratory analysis, summary statistics, distributions, aggregations, pivot tables, time series and trend analysis, segmentation and cohort analysis, anomaly detection, and interpretation of relationships between metrics. This topic covers hypothesis generation and validation, basic statistical testing, controlled experiments and split testing, sensitivity and robustness checks, and sense checking results against domain knowledge. It emphasizes connecting metrics to business outcomes, defining success criteria and measurement plans, synthesizing quantitative and qualitative evidence, and prioritizing recommendations based on impact feasibility risk and dependencies. Practical communication skills are assessed including charting dashboards crafting concise narratives and tailoring findings to non technical and technical stakeholders, along with documenting next steps experiments and how outcomes will be measured.
Metrics and KPI Fundamentals
Core principles and practical fluency for defining, measuring, and interpreting metrics and key performance indicators. Candidates should be able to select meaningful metrics aligned to business objectives rather than vanity metrics, explain the difference between a metric and a target, and distinguish leading indicators from lagging indicators. Coverage includes decomposing complex outcomes into actionable component metrics, writing precise metric definitions such as what counts as a daily active user and monthly active user, calculating common metrics such as engagement rate, churn rate and conversion rates, establishing baselines and sensible targets, and interpreting signal versus noise including awareness of statistical variability. Also includes using segmentation and cohort analysis to diagnose metric movements and recommending two to three meaningful metrics for a hypothetical problem with justification and action plans.
Web Analytics and Digital Measurement
Domain specific analytics skills focused on web and product measurement. Includes knowledge of web analytics platforms, event and page view instrumentation, funnel and cohort analysis, attribution models including multi touch attribution, customer journey tracking, conversion rate optimization signals, sessionization and cookie limitations, and interpreting traffic and engagement metrics. Candidates should be able to diagnose tracking gaps, reason about attribution and attribution bias, evaluate experiments in a web context, and generate insights and actions to improve funnels and user experience.