Metrics question
Amazon has noticed a 20% drop in daily active users in India. Find the Root cause?
- Amazon
- Metrics
- Hard
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What this question tests
Root cause analysis for a large regional engagement drop, requiring structured, prioritized hypothesis testing.
How to approach it
- Confirm the drop is real: rule out a tracking or app version reporting issue specific to the India market first.
- Segment by platform and app version, since a broken release in India's Android-heavy market could explain a large regional drop.
- Check external factors: a competitor's aggressive promotion, a regulatory change, or a local internet or payment disruption.
- Check internal factors: a recent India-specific feature change, pricing update, or removal of a popular payment method like UPI.
- Segment by user cohort: new versus existing users, to see if the drop is acquisition-driven or retention-driven.
- Propose the top hypothesis, likely a payment or app stability issue given the sharp 20 percent size, and outline the data pull to confirm.
What a strong answer includes
- Treats a 20 percent regional drop as large enough to suspect a specific breaking change, not gradual organic decline.
- Names a concrete, India-specific hypothesis, like a UPI payment integration issue, given how central UPI is to Indian ecommerce.
- Segments by new versus existing users to distinguish an acquisition problem from a retention or usability problem.
- Proposes checking app version and platform data first, since regional drops are often caused by broken releases.
Common mistakes
- Treating this as a global engagement problem instead of investigating why it is concentrated in India.
- Skipping the payment method angle despite UPI's central role in Indian ecommerce.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you check if this is a payment related issue specifically?
- What would you do if the drop was concentrated in one Android app version?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 9: Prove it paid off: outcomes, economics, and pricing
- Chapter 2: Data fluency: SQL, logs, and reading the truth yourself
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop