Diagnose a 30% Fall in Online Purchases at The New Yorker

Online orders at The New Yorker are down 30%. As the product manager, walk through how you would find out why. ```hint Check the number first Before blaming the product or the market, make sure the drop is real: how orders are counted, whether tracking or reporting changed, and which baseline the 30% is measured against. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - What counts as an online order here: new digital or print subscriptions, gift subscriptions, renewals, or items from the magazine's shop? - Over what period is the drop measured, and against which baseline: the previous week, the previous month or the same period last year? - Did the drop happen suddenly on a specific date, or build up gradually? - Is it only the number of orders that fell, or also revenue and traffic to the site and apps? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Confirming the definition, time window and baseline, and ruling out tracking, reporting or definition changes before analyzing behavior - Breaking orders into a funnel (visits, subscribe prompts or paywall views, offer views, checkout starts, completed orders) to find the stage that fell - Segmenting by product, gift versus self purchase, platform, traffic source, region and offer to localize the drop - Separating external causes (seasonality, news cycle, referral platform changes, competitors) from internal ones (pricing, paywall, checkout, campaigns, releases), with the data that would confirm each - Prioritized next steps once a cause is confirmed, plus monitoring that would catch a repeat earlier ### Follow-up Questions - Suppose the drop turns out to be confined to purchases in the iOS app and starts on a single date. What would you check next? - Traffic is flat but checkout completion fell. Which hypotheses rise to the top, and how would you test them? - How would you tell a lasting decline in demand from a return to normal after an unusually strong period?