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Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Interview Questions

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Data Structures & Algorithms

Compute Deviation

This problem involves identifying duplicate numbers in a list of integers. The function should return a list of the duplicate numbers.

Find Duplicate Numbers in a List

Create a function that converts each integer in the list into its corresponding Roman numeral representation

Integer to Roman

Write a function to return the value of the nearest node that is a parent to both nodes.

Nearest Common Ancestor

This question requires the implementation of the Fibonacci sequence using three different methods: recursively, iteratively, and using memoization.

Implementing the Fibonacci Sequence in Three Different Methods

Machine Learning

Loan Model

Decision Tree Evaluation

Spam Classifier 

How would you build a model or algorithm to generate respawn locations for an online third person shooter game like Halo?

Video Game Respawn Model

Build a k Nearest Neighbors classification model from scratch.

KNN From Scratch

Product Sense & Metrics

Group Success

WAU vs Open Rates

Google Maps Improvement

Docs Metrics

How would you present the performance of each subscription to an executive?

Analyzing Churn Behavior

Statistics

Time on FB Distribution

P-value to a Layman

Compute Variance

Write a function to bootstrap the confidence interface for a list of integers

Bootstrapping Confidence Intervals

What are confidence intervals and how are they useful

Confidence Interval Explanation

Business Case

Friend Requests Down

Unified Inbox

Game Feature Home

Customer Success vs. Free Trial

Will a subscription model with a 20% discount surpass non-subscription revenue given certain retention rates?

E-Commerce Subscription Retention

When an interviewer asks a question along the lines of:

<ul>
<li>What would your current manager say about you? What constructive criticisms might he give?</li>
<li>What are your three biggest strengths and weaknesses you have identified in yourself?</li>
</ul>

How would you respond?

When asked about your strengths in an interview, what is an effective way to respond?

When asked about your strengths in an interview, what is an effective way to respond?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses I

Which of the following is an acceptable strategy when discussing weaknesses in an interview?

Which of the following is an acceptable strategy when discussing weaknesses in an interview?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses II

What do you tell an interviewer when they ask you what your strengths and weaknesses are?

Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Brainteasers

When an interviewer asks you a question along the lines of:

<ul>
<li>Why did you apply to our company?</li>
<li>What are you looking for in your next job?</li>
<li>What makes you a good fit for our company?</li>
</ul>

How should you respond?

When asked 'What are you looking for in your next job?' in an interview, how can you tie the company's employee benefits into your response?

When asked 'What are you looking for in your next job?' in an interview, how can you tie the company's employee benefits into your response?

Why Do You Want to Work With Us I

How can company values be used effectively in an interview when asked 'What makes you a good fit for our company?'

How can company values be used effectively in an interview when asked 'What makes you a good fit for our company?'

Why Do You Want to Work With Us II

When responding to the question 'Why did you apply to our company?' during an interview, what aspect should you highlight?

When responding to the question 'Why did you apply to our company?' during an interview, what aspect should you highlight?

Why Do You Want to Work With Us III

How would you answer when an Interviewer asks why you applied to their company?

Why Do You Want to Work With Us

How would you explain what a p-value is to someone who is not technical?

What does a p-value in a statistical test represent?

What does a p-value in a statistical test represent?

P-value to a Layman I

In a statistical test, how does a low p-value (less than 0.05) influence our decision about the null hypothesis?

In a statistical test, how does a low p-value (less than 0.05) influence our decision about the null hypothesis?

P-value to a Layman II

Let’s say that you’re training a classification model.

How would you combat overfitting when building tree-based models?

Let's say that you're training a classification model.   How would you combat overfitting when building tree-based models?

Overfit Avoidance

Write a SQL query to select the 2nd highest salary in the engineering department.

Note: If more than one person shares the highest salary, the query should select the next highest salary.

Example:

Input:

<code>employees</code> table

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Column</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>first_name</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>last_name</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>salary</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>department_id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<code>departments</code> table

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Column</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>id</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><code>name</code></td>
<td>VARCHAR</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Output:

<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th>Column</th>
<th>Type</th>
</tr>
</thead>

<tbody>
<tr>
<td><code>salary</code></td>
<td>INTEGER</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

Select the 2nd highest salary in the engineering department

2nd Highest Salary

Given a list of integers, identify all the duplicate values in the list. Assume that the list can contain both positive and negative numbers, and the order of the list does not matter. A number is considered a duplicate if it appears more than once in the list. Return a list of the duplicate numbers.

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>find_duplicates(nums) -&gt; [1, 2, 3]
</code></pre>

The numbers 1, 2, and 3 all appear more than once in the list, so they are considered duplicates.

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1, -1, 2, 3, 3, -1]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>find_duplicates(nums) -&gt; [-1, 3]
</code></pre>

The numbers -1 and 3 both appear more than once in the list, so they are considered duplicates. Note that the order of the output does not matter.

Example 3:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>find_duplicates(nums) -&gt; []
</code></pre>

None of the numbers in the list appear more than once, so there are no duplicates.

Let’s say we want to launch a re-design of a landing page to improve the click-through rate. We can do this by implementing an AB test.
Given that we launch an AB test, how would you infer if the results of the click-through rate were statistically significant or not?

How can you accurately conclude if the results of an A/B test, conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a landing page redesign, are statistically significant?

How can you accurately conclude if the results of an A/B test, conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a landing page redesign, are statistically significant?

Statistically Significant Test

Precisely ascertain whether the outcomes of an A/B test, executed to assess the impact of a landing page redesign, exhibit statistical significance.

A/B Testing

Let’s say you are working on Google Docs. A product manager comes to you and asks how the product is doing. 

What are the top five metrics that you would start tracking to understand the health of Google Docs?

The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones, usually starting with 0 and 1. It is often used in algorithm examples, and is defined by the following formula: F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2), with F(0) = 0 and F(1) = 1.

Your task is to implement the Fibonacci algorithm in three different methods:
1. Recursively
2. Iteratively
3. Using Memoization

Example 1:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>n = 5
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>fibonacci(n) -&gt; 5
</code></pre>

Example 2:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>n = 10
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>fibonacci(n) -&gt; 55
</code></pre>

The Fibonacci sequence starts as follows: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…

Let’s say you work as a data scientist at a bank.

You are tasked with building a decision tree model to predict if a borrower will pay back a personal loan they are taking out.

<ol>
<li>How would you evaluate whether using a decision tree algorithm is the correct model for the problem?</li>

<li>Let’s say you move forward with the decision tree model. How would you evaluate the performance of the model before deployment and after?</li>
</ol>

Let’s say you’re given all the different marketing channels along with their respective marketing costs at a company called Mode, that sells B2B analytics dashboards.

What metrics would you use to determine the value of each marketing channel?

When determining the value of each marketing channel for the company Mode, which metric is considered the key metric?

When determining the value of each marketing channel for the company Mode, which metric is considered the key metric?

Marketing Channel Metrics

What metrics would you use to determine the value of each marketing channel?

Analytics

What is a confidence interval for a statistic? Why is it useful to know the confidence interval for a statistic and how do you calculate it?

Let’s you’re tasked with pitching a new feature for Google Home. Your co-worker comes to you with an idea to build a game feature for Google Home.

How would you go about deciding whether Google should build it?

An ecommerce company is experiencing a reduction in revenue for the past 12 months. You have the following transaction data:

<ul>
<li>Date of sale</li>

<li>Total $ Amount paid by customer</li>

<li>Profit Margin per unit</li>

<li>Quantity of item</li>

<li>Item category</li>

<li>Item subcategory</li>

<li>Marketing attribution source</li>

<li>% discount applied</li>
</ul>

How would you analyze the dataset to understand exactly where the revenue loss is occurring?

How would you analyze the dataset to understand exactly where the revenue loss is occurring?

Evaluating Revenue Decline

How would you measure the success of Facebook Groups?

Considering the purpose of Facebook Groups as a platform for connecting users through shared interests or real-life relationships, which metrics would be appropriate to measure the success of these groups?

Considering the purpose of Facebook Groups as a platform for connecting users through shared interests or real-life relationships, which metrics would be appropriate to measure the success of these groups?

Let’s say we’re testing a new UI with the goal to increase conversion rates. We test it by giving the new UI to a random subset of users.

The test variant wins by 5% on the target metric. What would you expect to happen after the new UI is applied to all users? Will the metric actually go up by ~5%, more, or less?

Note: Assume there is no novelty effect.

New UI Effect

What do you think are the most important metrics for WhatsApp?

What is the optimal strategy for reducing customer churn rate in a messaging platform like WhatsApp?

What is the optimal strategy for reducing customer churn rate in a messaging platform like WhatsApp?

WhatsApp Metrics

You are given a binary tree of unique positive numbers. Each node in the binary tree is represented as a dictionary with the following keys:

<ul>
<li><code>data</code>: integer value stored in the node</li>
<li><code>left</code>: reference to the left child (or <code>None</code>)</li>
<li><code>right</code>: reference to the right child (or <code>None</code>)</li>
</ul>

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>node = {
 &#34;data&#34;: 6,
 &#34;left&#34;: {
 &#34;data&#34;: 3,
 &#34;left&#34;: {...},
 &#34;right&#34;: {...}
 },
 &#34;right&#34;: {
 &#34;data&#34;: 9,
 &#34;left&#34;: {...},
 &#34;right&#34;: {...}
 }
}
</code></pre>

Given two node values as input (<code>value1</code> and <code>value2</code>), write a function to return the value of the nearest common ancestor (lowest node in the tree that has both nodes as descendants).

Note: If one of the nodes doesn’t exist in the tree, return <code>-1</code>.

Example:

Input:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code># Diagram of the binary tree
&#39;&#39;&#39;
 6 
 / \ 
 3 9 
 / \
 2 11
 / \
 5 8
&#39;&#39;&#39;
value1 = 8
value2 = 2
</code></pre>

Output:

<pre tabindex="0" class="chroma"><code>common_ancestor(root,value1,value2) -&gt; 3
</code></pre>

Explanation:

<ul>
<li>Ancestors of <code>8</code>: <code>11 → 3 → 6</code></li>
<li>Ancestors of <code>2</code>: <code>3 → 6</code></li>
<li>Common ancestors: <code>3</code> and <code>6</code></li>
<li>The nearest common ancestor is <code>3</code>.</li>
</ul>

Let’s say you work for an e-commerce company. Vendors can send products to the company’s warehouse to be listed on the website. Users are able to order any in-stock products and submit returns for refunds if they’re not satisfied.

The front end of the website includes a vendor portal that provides sales data in daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly intervals.

The company wants to expand worldwide. They put you in charge of designing its end-to-end architecture, so you need to know what significant factors you’ll need to consider. What clarifying questions would you ask?

What kind of end-to-end architecture would you design for this company (both for ETL and reporting)?

How would you design a data warehouse for a e-commerce company looking to expand internationally?

International e-Commerce Warehouse

Data Pipelines

Let’s say that you’re the PM on Google Maps.

<ol>
<li>How would you improve Google Maps?</li>

<li>What metrics would you check to see if your feature improvements are successful?</li>
</ol>

Let’s say you are tasked with building a spam classifier for emails. Assume that you’ve built a V1 of the model.

What metrics would you use to track accuracy and validity of the model?

Let’s say that you’re in charge of an e-commerce D2C business that sells socks.

What business health metrics would you care about tracking on a company dashboard?

Let’s say that you're in charge of an e-commerce D2C business that sells socks. What business health metrics would you care?

D2C Socks e-Commerce

Let’s say that you’re a data scientist on the engagement team. A product manager comes up to you and says that the weekly active users metric is up 5% but email notification open rates are down 2%.

What would you investigate to diagnose what’s happening?

Email Open Rate

Let’s say that you work for a company like Netflix. Netflix has two pricing plans: $15/month or $100/year.

Let’s say an executive at the company wants you to analyze the churn behavior of users that subscribe to either plan.

What kinds of metrics / graphs / models would you build to help give the executive an over-arching view of how the subscriptions are performing?

Let’s say you have a time series dataset grouped monthly for the past five years.

How would you find out if the difference between this month and the previous month was significant or not?

Significance Time Series

Forecasting & Time Series

A product manager at Facebook comes to you and tells you that friend requests are down 10%.

What would you do?

You work as a data analyst on a social media platform similar to Facebook. If you observe a 10% decline in friend requests over the last three months, which analysis or metric-tracking approach could aid in uncovering the reasons?

You work as a data analyst on a social media platform similar to Facebook. If you observe a 10% decline in friend requests over the last three months, which analysis or metric-tracking approach could aid in uncovering the reasons?

You’re a data scientist for Instagram’s product team.

A product manager proposes changing the platform’s messaging system to allow interactions with other platforms and third-party businesses.

For example, Instagram could partner with GrubHub to allow the company to send messages to Instagram users about their GrubHub order.

Question: How would you determine whether this change is a good idea?

Let’s say you’re working on a building a better search engine for Google. You build it and want to see if it serves better results than the existing one in production.

How would you determine which search engine performed better? Which metrics would you track?

Comparing Search Engines

Let’s say that you’re in charge of Square’s small business division. 

The CEO wants to hire a customer success manager to help manage a new software product. Another executive thinks that it’s worth just instituting a free trial instead.

What would be your recommendation on utilizing a customer success manager versus just a free trial to get new or existing customers to use the new product?

Let’s say you work for a bank that gives out personal loans. Your co-worker develops a model that takes in customer inputs and returns if a loan should be given or not.

<ol>
<li>What kind of model did the co-worker develop? 
</li>
<li>Another co-worker thinks they have developed a better model to predict defaults on the loans. Given that personal loans are monthly installments of payments, how would you measure the difference between the two credit risk models within a timeframe? 
</li>
<li>What metrics would you track to measure the success of the new model?</li>
</ol>

Challenge

<h5>Product Manager, Data Collaboration </h5>Headquartered in New York City, Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. is a leading developer, publisher, and marketer of interactive entertainment for consumers around the globe. We develop and publish products principally through Rockstar Games, 2K, and Zynga. Our strategy is to create hit entertainment experiences, delivered on every platform relevant to our audience through a variety of sound business models. Our pillars - creativity, innovation, and efficiency - guide us as we strive to create the highest quality, most captivating experiences for our consumers. The Company's common stock is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the symbol TTWO. While our offices (physical and virtual) are casual and inviting, we are deeply committed to our core tenets of creativity, innovation and efficiency, and individual and team development opportunities. Our industry and business are continually evolving and fast-paced, providing numerous opportunities to learn and hone your skills. We work hard, but we also like to have fun, and believe that we provide a great place to come to work each day to pursue your passions. <h5>The Challenge </h5>Take-Two Interactive is seeking a Product Manager (Data Collaboration) to join our Marketing Innovation and Technology (MIT) department. In this role, you will coordinate strategic data initiatives while managing relationships with a global network of technology vendors, advertising platforms, and data partners. You will be responsible for the end-to-end lifecycle of data collaboration solutions: identifying new market opportunities, pitching innovative partnership ideas, and operationalizing scalable technical workflows that drive measurable business value. This position requires a builder's mindset, combining technical product management with proactive business development to move our capabilities from experimental to permanent, automated functions within the interactive entertainment industry. <h5>What You'll Take On </h5><h5>Within 90 Days: </h5><ul> <li>Learn and Adapt: Immerse yourself in the technology stack, day-to-day operations, and the specific business needs. </li><li>Understand the Roadmap: Gain a deep understanding of our current goals, objectives, and the long-term data collaboration strategy. </li><li>System Onboarding: Begin taking on responsibility for specific workflows and assume partial ownership of key internal data collaboration systems and partner relationships. </li></ul> <h5>Within 180 Days: </h5><ul> <li>Full Ownership: Transition to full ownership of designated systems and platform relationships, serving as the primary point of contact for technical and operational issues. </li><li>Proactive Growth: Identify and pitch new partnership opportunities or technology integrations that drive further value to the business. </li><li>Operational Impact: Drive measurable improvements in team productivity, product quality, and the efficiency of our data collaboration workflows. </li></ul> <h5>Product Strategy & Development </h5><ul> <li>Identify and prioritize opportunities for value creation, enhanced usability, and technical feasibility by analyzing technology-related business needs. </li><li>Formulate technical requirements and create associated documentation (PRDs) to establish and maintain the product roadmap. </li><li>Partner with engineering and cross functional teams to determine feasibility, prioritize features, and ensure the successful implementation of requirements. </li><li>Improve media efficiency and attribution accuracy through technical solutions that strengthen marketing performance and ROI. </li><li>Support the adoption of new solutions, ensuring they meet the complex needs of our players, marketers, and partners. </li></ul> <h5>Relationship Management </h5><ul> <li>Actively evaluate the market for new data partners and technology solutions; identify and establish strategic relationships that drive business value. </li><li>Effectively pitch data collaboration concepts and technical solutions to internal teams and external partners to secure buy-in and expand our reach. </li><li>Establish and maintain strong relationships with Marketing, Technology, and Data leaders. </li><li>Coordinate with vendors and supporting teams within Take-Two to solve technical and operational problems. </li><li>Define and communicate the features and benefits of technology solutions to partners and manage commercial/data agreements for renewals and marketing opportunities. </li></ul> <h5>Innovation and Value Generation </h5><ul> <li>Stay current with emerging technology and market trends to improve internal capabilities and maintain a strategic advantage. </li><li>Expand Data Clean Room (DCR) capabilities across the key pillars of Insights, Activation, and Measurement, ensuring alignment with company core tenets. </li><li>Position and advocate for data innovation to leadership, using metrics (e.g., acquisition, engagement, retention, LTV) to showcase value and impact. </li></ul> <h5>Operational Excellence </h5><ul> <li>Oversee the technical management of DCR platforms, including scoping, onboarding, and maintenance. </li><li>Guide the Data Collaboration Governance Committee to standardize frameworks that facilitate secure data collaboration and insights. </li><li>Drive continuous improvement in team processes, including procurement, budgeting, compliance, and product delivery workflows to enhance productivity and quality. </li></ul> <h5>What You Bring </h5>As a Product Manager (Data Collaboration), you focus on execution and solving ambiguous problems that support the product strategy. You define and launch product solutions for complex user needs (player, marketer, partner). <ul> <li>3-5+ years of practical experience developing and driving solutions powered by technology, with a strong emphasis on the partnership landscape. </li><li>Practical experience with Data Clean Room platforms (e.g., Meta Advanced Analytics, Google Ads Data Hub, Snowflake, LiveRamp, or InfoSum). </li><li>Ability to speak to partners, pitch complex ideas, and build long term relationships. You know how to navigate the market to find and establish new value-driving relationships. </li><li>Solid understanding of digital advertising, marketing partnerships, and data architecture. You must understand the AdTech and Identity worlds (DSPs, Identity Brokers, and Advertising Platforms). </li><li>Clear communicator with the ability to explain technical concepts and solutions to various audiences, ranging from leadership to technical vendors. </li><li>Understanding of privacy-related regulations (e.g. COPPA, GDPR, CCPA, etc.) and experience managing sensitive data in a compliant manner. </li><li>Strong background in digital innovation, preferably experience in the interactive entertainment industry. </li><li>Ability to establish and navigate high-level relationships, prioritizing timely updates & risk management. </li><li>Demonstrates strong creativity and scrappiness and can handle constraints with grace. </li><li>Practical experience with budgeting, contract management, and compliance in a tech environment. </li></ul> <h5>What We Offer You </h5><ul> <li>Great Company Culture. Ranked as one of the most creative and innovative places to work, creativity, innovation, efficiency, diversity and philanthropy are among the core tenets of our organization and are integral drivers of our continued success. </li><li>Growth: As a global entertainment company, we pride ourselves on creating environments where employees are encouraged to be themselves, inquisitive, collaborative and to grow within and around the company. </li><li>Work Hard, Play Hard. Our employees bond, blow-off steam, and flex some creative muscles through corporate boot camp classes, company parties, game release events, monthly socials, and team challenges. </li><li>Benefits. Medical (HSA & FSA), dental, vision, 401(k) with company match, employee stock purchase plan, commuter benefits, in-house wellness program, broad learning & development opportunities, a charitable giving platform with company match and more! </li><li>Perks. Fitness allowance, employee discount programs, free games & events and stocked pantries. </li> </ul>

Calculate Moving Average	SQL	Easy
Predict Customer Churn	Machine Learning	Medium
A/B Test Significance	Statistics	Medium
Optimize Query Performance	SQL	Hard
Feature Importance Analysis	Machine Learning	Medium
Clean Missing Data	Python	Easy
Neural Network Architecture	Deep Learning	Hard
Calculate Cohort Retention	SQL	Medium
Bayesian Probability	Statistics	Easy
Recommend Similar Products	Machine Learning	Hard

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Interview Questions

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Interview Guides

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Interview Questions

Challenge

Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. Opening Jobs

Discussion & Interview Experiences

Discussion & Interview Experiences