Metrics question
Engagement is going down by 10% month on month for your product. What data /metrics would you look at?
- Metrics
- Medium
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What this question tests
Structured metrics investigation for a sustained engagement decline, distinguishing severity and root cause paths.
How to approach it
- Confirm the trend is sustained, not a one-month blip, by checking at least 3 months of data.
- Break engagement into components: daily active users, session frequency, and session depth, to find which is actually dropping.
- Segment by user cohort: new users versus long-tenured users, since retention curves differ and point to different causes.
- Check for external factors: seasonality, a competitor launch, or a platform change like an iOS privacy update affecting tracking.
- Check for internal factors: a recent product change, a bug, or a content or supply-side quality drop.
- Propose the top hypothesis with a plan to confirm it via a specific data pull or targeted user research.
What a strong answer includes
- Breaks a vague 'engagement' term into concrete components like DAU, session frequency, and session length before analyzing.
- Segments by user tenure, noting a drop concentrated in new users points to onboarding, while a drop in long-tenured users points to fatigue or a competitor.
- Names both external hypotheses, like a competitor launch, and internal ones, like a recent product regression.
- Insists on checking at least a few months of data before treating a 10 percent monthly decline as a confirmed structural trend.
Common mistakes
- Treating 'engagement' as one number without breaking it into components.
- Jumping to a fix before segmenting by user cohort to localize the cause.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you distinguish a seasonal dip from a real structural decline?
- What would you check first if new users were driving the drop?
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More questions from Google
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