Design an A/B test for a pricing model

Last updated: January 10, 2026

Quick Overview

Design an experiment to test the impact of new pricing tiers. Include sample size calculation, metrics, and analysis plan.

Palantir
Analytics & Experimentation
Data Scientist
Palantir
January 10, 2026
Data Scientist
Technical Screen
Analytics & Experimentation
Easy

48

4

2,087 solved


Design an experiment to test the impact of new pricing tiers. Include sample size calculation, metrics, and analysis plan.

Palantir asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your experimentation skills. They want to see how you define success metrics, design controlled experiments, and interpret results with appropriate statistical rigor.

What the Interviewer Expects
  • Define clear success metrics aligned with business goals
  • Propose a basic experimental design with control and treatment groups
  • Interpret results correctly and draw reasonable conclusions
  • Identify obvious confounding variables
Key Topics to Cover
Long-term vs short-term metrics
Guardrail metrics
Simpson's paradox and ecological fallacy
Network effects and interference
Metric definition and success criteria
A/B testing methodology
How to Approach This
  1. Define success metrics carefully. A good metric is measurable, actionable, and aligned with business goals.
  2. Run experiments long enough to account for novelty effects and weekly seasonality.
  3. Use funnel analysis to identify where users drop off for maximum optimization impact.
  4. Segment results by key dimensions (platform, country, user cohort) to catch hidden patterns.
  5. Consider network effects and interference between treatment and control groups.
Possible Follow-up Questions
  • How would you handle an experiment where the control and treatment groups are different sizes?
  • How would you handle seasonality in your experiment?
  • What if the experiment shows a positive short-term effect but you suspect a negative long-term impact?
  • What if you discover a bug in the logging during the experiment?
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Sample Answer
Problem Setup

The analytical question here is: "What is the impact of the new pricing tiers on customer conversion rates and overall revenue?" To address this, we need data on customer behavior before and after the...

Methodology

For this A/B test, we will randomly assign users to one of two groups: the control group (existing pricing model) and the treatment group (new pricing tiers). We will use a two-tailed t-test to compar...


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