1 min lesson
Don't hide in the notebook on the tooling round
Use the evidence to decide "Which two onsite rounds do candidates most often underweight and why is each costly to neglect?" Explain the choice plainly.
Step 1 of 2
Pre-assign your best stories to rounds before you walk in: one metric you operationalized for the metric-design round, one confounded regression you untangled for the causal round, one self-serve tool you shipped for the tooling round. Walking in with the mapping already done means you spend the round answering, not searching your memory.
Two rounds are easy to underprepare: tooling and product/craft. The tooling mandate runs from instrumentation through analysis to self-serve tools, so a SQL file alone misses it. Talk about semantic layers, alerting thresholds and dashboards a non-DS can act on. The product/craft round is also decisive because shallow hands-on use is easy to spot. Bring specific opinions from running Cursor and rival agents on real work.