Cold-Start Personalization for New Disney+ Subscribers
Company: Disney
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager on Disney+. Recommendations normally lean on what a subscriber has already watched, but someone who signed up today has watched almost nothing. Design how Disney+ should recommend titles to new customers during their first days on the service: decide which new customers you are designing for, the problems they run into, the product experience and the recommendation approach behind it, and how you would know it is working.
```hint Count the signals you already have
A brand-new subscriber is not a blank slate. Think about what the sign-up path, the profile setup and the first few minutes of browsing reveal, and weigh each extra question you ask against the friction it adds before the first play.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "new customer" mean a brand-new account, or also a new profile added to a household account that already has viewing history?
- Is the main goal getting a first title started quickly, or keeping new subscribers through their first billing cycle and beyond?
- Which surfaces are in scope: a step during sign-up, the home screen rows, search, or all of them, and on which devices (TV apps versus phones)?
- Should kids' profiles be handled in the same design, or treated separately because of content ratings and parental controls?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal for new-customer recommendations tied to activation and early retention, and a reasoned choice of which new customers to design for first.
- The signals available before any viewing history exists, and the trade-off between asking new customers about their tastes and inferring them.
- A concrete first-days experience and the recommendation logic behind it, including how it hands over to fully personalized ranking as history accumulates.
- Success metrics for the first days and weeks, with guardrails and a way to test the design.
- Risks such as onboarding drop-off, privacy, kids' content, and narrowing every new customer to the same few franchises.
### Follow-up Questions
- A new subscriber skips every onboarding question and leaves after browsing for two minutes. What do they see when they come back, and how quickly can it adapt?
- How would you design an experiment that shows the new experience improves retention, not just plays in the first week?
- Several people share a new account but nobody has set up separate profiles. How does that change your approach?
Overview: A Disney+ product design question about recommending titles to brand-new subscribers who have little or no viewing history. It tests segmenting new customers, gathering preference signals without slowing onboarding, handling the cold-start problem, and choosing activation and retention metrics.