Amazon · Statistics & Data Analysis
How would you test a price increase?
TrueInterview
October 7, 2026 · 2 min read
Question
Imagine you are a data scientist working on a B2C subscription product: an AI video editing tool that offers a free trial and several paid plans. Product leadership is weighing a price increase—for instance, raising the Pro plan's monthly price by 10-25%—and may also adjust what each plan includes. Outline the analysis and experimentation plan that would support this decision. Specifically:
- Should we raise prices at all? Before running any test, how would you assess whether an increase is likely to help?
- What exactly would you launch, and for whom? Consider the price change and/or packaging change—list price, included credits, tier structure, annual versus monthly billing—and specify which plans, regions, and customer segments it would affect.
- How would you estimate price sensitivity / elasticity using existing data, and how much confidence would you place in that estimate?
- Design the experiment. Cover the randomization unit, treatment arms, population, duration, and statistical power, and specifically explain how you would treat existing subscribers differently from new signups.
- What are the success metrics? Include primary, diagnostic, and guardrail metrics, along with the tradeoffs among them.
- Which segments matter, and why is segmentation important in this case? Examples include new versus existing users, region, creator/professional versus casual users, and plan tier.
- What confounders, biases, and risks would you monitor? Examples include seasonality, competitor promotions, selection effects, plan switching and cannibalization, and delayed churn.
- What would you do if full randomization of price is not possible due to legal, app store, or fairness constraints?
- How would you interpret the results and make the decision? Include stopping criteria, a ramp plan, and the final rollout recommendation. Overview: This is an Amazon data scientist technical screen case on pricing. It asks you to decide whether to raise the price of a subscription product, select the price point and packaging, and design the experiment that validates the choice. A strong answer covers per-visitor profit and LTV metrics, guardrails, elasticity estimation, randomization at the billing-account level, and how to treat existing subscribers when they renew. It also addresses two common pitfalls: evaluating a subscription price test on short-horizon revenue, and measuring churn only among users who converted.
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