The ultimate guide to product analytics interviews. Strategies developed by FAANG engineers to craft structured, impactful answers and increase your chances of landing a data science job.

Product analytics interviews evaluate your skills and creativity as an aspiring data analyst. Interview questions evaluate if you can use your technical knowledge to guide the further development of a product. Learning how to answer these questions is crucial to ace most job interviews for data scientists and analysts.

In this course, you’ll first gain an overview of what product analytics interviews look like and what kinds of questions usually come up. Next, you’ll learn to use a framework for answering product analytics questions, showcasing your analytical skills. Finally, you’ll learn how to apply said framework to different kinds of product analytics interview questions by looking at several examples.

With this course, you’ll increase your chances of landing a job in data science by learning how to effectively answer product analytics interview questions. You’ll be able to provide well-structured and well-communicated answers, and show you can creatively tackle any business problem you may face.

Ace the Product Analytics Job Interview

# Problem

[Let’s say that at Netflix, we offer a subscription where customers can enroll for a 30-day free trial. After 30 days, customers will be automatically charged based on the package selected.](https://www.interviewquery.com/questions/netflix-retention)

For this scenario, we want to measure the success of acquiring new users through the free trial.

How can we measure acquisition success, and what metrics can we use to measure the success of the free trial?

Try answering this on your own before continuing. Use the hints below if you are stuck.




One way we can frame the concept specifically to this problem is to think about controllable inputs, external drivers, and then the observable output.

Let’s think about what the major goals of Netflix are.


What is Netflix's business model?

* Acquiring new users to their subscription plan.
* Decreasing churn and increasing retention.

Now how does that affect how Netflix might acquire new users?

Think about the quality of acquisition, after signing up for paid memberships. Can we measure the “effectiveness” of the acquisition in some way? 

In other words, what metrics can we measure that will define success from a top-level viewpoint for acquisition?

# Solution

Let’s go back to thinking about a strategy for questions on product metrics. One way we can tailor the concept to this problem is to think about controllable inputs, external drivers, and then the observable output. It is critical to spend most of the time in the interview creating good/bad benchmarks, having numeric goals, explaining actual performance vs. expectation, evaluating inputs, and not being bogged down over other KPIs that we can’t really influence.

With that in mind, let’s start out by stating the main goals of the question. The chart below gives us an overview of Netflix’s business model. 



Try to solve this question to test your understanding of the material.


Sample Question: Netflix Retention

Try to solve this question to test your understanding of the material.

Introduction

Investigating Metrics

Fractional Metrics

Measuring Success

Feature Change

Metric Trade-Offs

Growth

Conclusion

Sample Question: Netflix Retention

Problem

Solution