Design an experiment to measure whether GitHub improved outcomes for IT leaders

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Microsoft is a productivity, software, AI, gaming, and cloud company; its products include Windows, Microsoft 365, Teams, LinkedIn, Xbox, Azure, Dynamics, and Copilot.

Microsoft wants to understand whether GitHub is improving outcomes for IT leaders in enterprise organizations. In this interview, you are asked to design an experiment and measurement approach that can credibly determine whether GitHub creates measurable value for this audience.

Focus on IT leaders as the primary decision-makers and accountable owners for developer productivity, security, compliance, platform standardization, cost control, and operational reliability. The experiment should connect GitHub usage to outcomes that matter at the organizational level, not just individual developer activity.

Assume GitHub is used in an enterprise context where teams may adopt products such as repositories, pull requests, Actions, security features, Copilot-related workflows, administration controls, or compliance tooling. Your task is to define how Microsoft should measure improvement, compare outcomes, and decide whether the observed impact is meaningful.

The experience should consider:

- The specific outcome or outcomes “improved outcomes for IT leaders” should represent

- The primary success metric, including numerator, denominator, and time window

- Secondary metrics that capture productivity, security, compliance, platform adoption, or operational efficiency

- How to define treatment and control groups in an enterprise GitHub environment

- Instrumentation needed across GitHub product usage, admin workflows, developer activity, and business outcomes

- Relevant cohorts such as company size, industry, maturity of engineering organization, or GitHub product tier

- Guardrail metrics to ensure improvements are not offset by security risk, developer dissatisfaction, cost increases, or workflow degradation

- How experiment results would inform a product, sales, or customer-success decision

The goal is to describe a practical, decision-useful metrics and experimentation plan that helps Microsoft determine whether GitHub is delivering measurable enterprise value for IT leaders.