These questions are made for product managers and data scientists to help them learn how to answer A/B testing questions and ace their next interview.
We’ve seen people do really well in A/B testing interviews and people answer questions in ways that made them look less qualified than they really were. That’s why we wrote this: to help you do it right, whether you work in data science or product management
You’ll get ideas for interview questions that will help you find out how good the candidate really is if you’re the hiring manager. If you’re the interviewee, you’ll find what you need to ace the interview.
Landing an interview at Amplitude is a great accomplishment – it means your resume and skills have impressed them enough to want to meet you in person But now comes the hard part – actually acing the interview!
In this article we’ll arm you with inside knowledge by covering the most commonly asked Amplitude interview questions. With the right preparation you’ll be ready to impress the hiring managers and unlock your dream job.
Overview of the Amplitude Hiring Process
Before we dive into specific questions let’s do a quick overview of what to expect during the Amplitude interview process
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Initial Screening Call: You’ll likely kick things off with a 30 minute phone screen with a recruiter. This is primarily to verify your skills and experience match the role.
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Technical/Coding Assessment: For engineering roles, expect a remote coding challenge or technical interview to assess your programming abilities. Know the languages and frameworks listed in the job description inside-out.
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Manager Interviews: Next up are a series of 1-hour interviews with your potential manager and cross-functional team members. This is your chance to showcase culture fit and impress them with your domain expertise.
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Executive Interview: For senior positions, an interview with an executive may be required as a final check on strategic thinking and leadership skills.
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Reference Checks: As a final step before an offer, Amplitude conducts reference checks to validate past performance and strengths.
Okay, now that you know what to expect, let’s get into the top 20 interview questions asked at Amplitude:
Amplitude Behavioral Interview Questions
Behavioral questions test soft skills like work style, personality, and culture fit. Use the STAR method – give a Situation, Task at hand, the Action you took, and the Result achieved.
Q1: Tell me about a time when you had to prove yourself in public. What was the situation and how did you handle it?
A question like this assesses your ability to perform under pressure and win people over. Pick an example that showcases skills relevant to the role – maybe a presentation to executives where you won funding, or a demo where you solved a client’s issues before an audience.
Q2: Share an occasion where you received difficult feedback. How did you respond?
With this question, interviewers want to see how you handle critique and have a growth mindset. Choose an instance where you disagreed with the feedback but kept an open mind, implemented changes, and improved as a result. Show you can take feedback constructively rather than being defensive.
Q3: Tell me about a time you had to stand up and disagree with a team member’s approach. Why did you feel it was necessary?
The focus here is on your teamwork, communication and conflict resolution abilities. Pick a case where someone’s approach seemed misaligned with the team or customer goals. Explain how you challenged it politely by presenting facts, ultimately convincing them to change course in the team’s best interests.
Q4: Describe a situation where you took ownership of resolving a complex issue on behalf of a customer. What actions did you take?
This question tests for initiative, problem-solving and customer orientation. Think of a technical issue that you could have passed off but chose to dig into yourself to ensure a customer-first solution. Walk through a structured approach of understanding the details, identifying solutions, and implementing fixes to achieve positive results.
Q5: What steps would you take to build trust within your team as a new leader?
Here the aim is to assess your people management approach and emotional intelligence. share how you would connect with reports one-on-one to understand their needs and goals. Highlight a focus on transparency, active listening, and advocating for the team. Give examples of how you would build psychological safety on the team.
Amplitude Operations and Execution Questions
This category of questions aims to evaluate your process orientation, execution skills and ability to deliver results. Use metrics and data to back up your responses.
Q6: Walk me through the key phases of a new product launch. In your view, what makes for a successful rollout?
This is a test of your product development process knowledge. Cover how you’d manage phases like ideation, requirements gathering, design, development, quality assurance, release, and monitoring. Emphasize collaboration across teams and continuous user feedback. Share learnings from past launches – metrics like uptake, retention and ROI.
Q7: What are some effective strategies for balancing new customer acquisition with account management for existing clients?
Here the focus is on your sales operations experience and account management skills. Discuss tactics like dedicating staff to upsell and nurture existing accounts while sales targets new logos. Highlight the importance of regular check-ins, proactive communication and addressing concerns quickly for client retention.
Q8: Can you share some tips for tailoring a pitch deck to land a deal with a large enterprise prospect?
This evaluates your ability to understand a prospect’s needs and present a tailored solution. Share how you’d research the company’s challenges through earnings reports and news. Then highlight customizing the pitch and demo to address their pain points, backed by relevant case studies and ROI data.
Q9: Tell me about a time you led cross-functional teams to successfully execute a complex project. How did you ensure collaboration?
Choose an example that demonstrates leadership and stakeholder management skills. Discuss techniques like aligning on vision, maintaining transparency, optimizing workflows, and troubleshooting conflicts. Share the positive business impact of bringing various teams together to successfully achieve an outcome.
Q10: How would you go about optimizing the performance of a platform experiencing scalability issues under peak loads?
This technical question tests your capacity planning and performance tuning abilities. Cover best practices like load testing, isolating bottlenecks, addressing inefficient DB queries, introducing caching, autoscaling, and optimizing hardware utilization. Share examples of how you’ve tuned systems to reduce latency by 50% and handle 2x more load.
Amplitude Role-Specific Questions
These questions target the specialized skills and domain knowledge required for the role you’re interviewing for. Ensure you’re well prepared in these areas.
For Product Manager Candidates
Q11: How would you go about determining the market need and product requirements when launching a new analytics product?
Showcase your user research, data analysis, and product strategy skills. Discuss techniques like developing buyer personas through surveys, analyzing competitors and market gaps, validating concepts with prototypes, and defining MVP features leveraging real user insights.
Q12: If your engineering team says a feature you’ve prioritized will take longer than expected, how would you handle this? What tradeoffs might you consider?
This tests your ability to adapt and focus on the big picture. Explain how you’d re-confirm resourcing needs, explore if functionality could be reduced while preserving core value, identify lower priority items to de-scope, and collaborate on a new realistic timeline that works for all stakeholders.
Q13: How would you determine which product features to invest in and prioritize on the product roadmap?
Demonstrate your analytical approach by covering usage metrics, user interviews, competitor analysis, and tying investments back to business objectives. Share how you make data-informed yet pragmatic decisions on roadmap prioritization based on impact vs effort.
For Sales Candidates
Q14: How would you approach converting leads into sales-qualified opportunities at scale? What techniques have been effective for you?
Showcase your lead nurturing skills by sharing strategies like content offers, drip campaigns, referral incentives and lead scoring to nurture prospects over time based on their engagement. Highlight technologies you’ve used to track prospect behavior and automate follow-ups.
Q15: Tell me about a time you lost a deal to a competitor. What did you learn from this experience?
Choose an example that showcases a growth mindset. Discuss researching why you lost – pricing, features, relationships etc. Explain how you applied learnings to strengthen competitive differentiation and unique value proposition going forward.
Q16: How would you go about developing a new territory for sales expansion? What factors are important to consider?
This evaluates strategic thinking and sales planning skills. Cover analyzing market potential through factors like buyer demographics, growth rates and competitors. Discuss tailoring pricing, positioning and partnerships to local dynamics. Share how you’d ramp up marketing, hiring and operations to build foundations for rapid growth.
For Engineering Candidates
Q17: How would you design a scalable cloud architecture to support a high-volume social media platform on AWS?
Demonstrate your cloud computing and scalability design skills. Cover concepts like multi-AZ redundancy, load balancing, auto-scaling, caching, CDN, decoupled microservices and database sharding. Reference architectures like LAMP that provide robust foundations for exponential growth.
Q18: What techniques would you use to profile and optimize the performance of a web application?
Showcase your understanding of optimization best practices like load testing, tracing, tuning inefficient queries, caching, compression, minimizing network calls, using efficient data structures and monitoring resource usage in production. Tools like Chrome Dev Tools and NewRelic can provide insights.
Q19: How would you securely design the database schema and API for a mobile banking application?
Discuss
Experiment design and setup
You can start your interview by foundational questions about A/B best practices such as:
- What are ideal conditions for A/B testing?
- What should you test?
- If you can’t do A/B testing, what other way would you answer the question?
- How long would you run an experiment for?
Questions like these will make a capable candidate warm up and feel more comfortable. The candidate’s answers should then show that they know both what they’re talking about and how to do it. They should also confirm that you speak the same language.
The next batch of questions can focus on the tools of trade:
- Based on your own experience, what A/B testing software do you feel is best, and why?
- How would you go about getting good at a newer A/B testing tool like Amplitude Experiment?
Great answers will demonstrate that the interviewee has first-hand experience with common tools. You’ll know they’ve done it before if they can give you a clear answer about how they usually learn a new tool. Lastly, if they ask you about your tools, that could mean they are ready to get started right away.
Next, consider asking questions about how to deal with problems that come up during experiments:
- How do you deal with small sample size issues?
- What problems might happen that would affect the results of your A/B tests as our product is being developed?
- How do you mitigate the issues?
- How can the test be set up so that the control and treatment don’t interfere with each other too much?
The candidate should be able to answer these questions using basic data science knowledge and show that they understand ideas like sample size calculators, test timing, and making clear hypotheses. The candidate’s answers should also show that they think about how to solve the problems in a structured and proactive way.
Align your questions with the A/B testing process
Ask questions in the same logical order as the order used in A/B testing. Start with designing the A/B tests before moving into measurement, analyzing results, and making decisions. This approach helps both interviewer and interviewee stay on track when the interview gets longer.
APTITUDE TEST Questions and ANSWERS! (How To Pass a JOB Aptitude Test in 2021!)
FAQ
Why are you interested in this role with amplitude?
How do you tell us about your experience in a B testing?
What was the interview process like at amplitude?
I interviewed at Amplitude in Dec 2022 The interview process was very friendly and fair. Their expectations were clearly communicated. Each team member seemed well prepared for an interview. The questions were well thought through and appropriate for the role. The process did not take too long and the HR team was very responsive and understanding.
What does Akhil do at amplitude?
Akhil is a senior ML scientist at Amplitude. He focuses on using statistics and machine learning to bring product insights to the Experiment product. Learn how to answer A/B testing questions and ace the next interview, with these prompts designed for product managers and data scientists.
How do you answer a pm interview question?
In the book “ Cracking the PM Interview ,” the authors suggest that the candidates answer the question by highlighting their experience, mentioning at least one specific accomplishment, and what attracted them to this job. For example: “I’ve been working as a product manager for the past four years.
What was the interview process like?
The interview process was very friendly and fair. Their expectations were clearly communicated. Each team member seemed well prepared for an interview. The questions were well thought through and appropriate for the role. The process did not take too long and the HR team was very responsive and understanding. I applied through a recruiter.
