In the product development ecosystem, one of the critical traits to build successful solutions is to make decisions based on data. It is one of the skills required in most products regardless of category or industry.

Nonetheless, it isn’t easy to assess how data literate someone is during an interview (or convincing others you are!). These are my thoughts exploring 4 aspects that can help understand a candidate’s data ability:

1. Ability to resolve data-driven questions

The first step is checking the capability to understand how to measure products and map product problems to data. We can divide it into 3 qualities:

1.1. Data models and frameworks

Having an understanding of the different ways to measure products depending on their type and the problem being solved, is probably the first step to being data literate.

While there are several models, we are not looking for a candidate who simply remembers a few clever acronyms. It is more useful to explore previous experiences and understand what the most important metrics were and why.

1.2. Can map decisions needed to data required

The second step would be to understand what data should be used in each decision scenario. For instance, knowing that to increase the number of sales, we need to search opportunities in the conversion funnel, understanding the drop rate at each step, and using segments to differentiate the behavior of different consumers.

We can prepare a few questions related to our domain and check how the candidate would go about the available data to decide:

• How would you search for opportunities to reduce the churn rate?
• How can we identify our best performing locations?
• What content in our platform is being more successful?
• How did new app users’ behavior change from July to August?

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