Diagnose Rising Netflix Homepage Browsing Alongside Falling Viewing Time

You are the product manager for the Netflix homepage. Visits to the homepage are high, and members are busy on it: they scroll, browse titles and even play trailers and previews. Yet a very large share of them leave without watching anything. Time spent on the homepage has gone up while overall viewing has gone down. Explain how you would understand what is going on and how you would fix it. ### Clarifying Questions - How is content consumption measured: hours streamed, titles started or titles finished, and per member or in total? - What counts as a drop-off: leaving from the homepage without starting a title, or ending the session within some time window? - When did the trends start, did they appear suddenly or gradually, and did homepage time and viewing change at the same moment? - Is the pattern spread evenly across devices, countries, plans and member tenure, or concentrated in some of them? ### Part 1 — Understand what is happening Explain how you would investigate: which checks come first, how you would break the problem down, and which hypotheses you would test, each with the evidence that would confirm or rule it out. ```hint Browsing time cuts both ways Before blaming the homepage, confirm the numbers mean what they appear to mean. Then ask whether the extra time reflects members enjoying discovery or struggling to choose, and what behavior would tell those apart. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Validation of the metrics, their definitions and logging before any diagnosis. - Segmentation and a funnel from homepage visit to sustained viewing. - Hypotheses about the product, the catalog, the member mix and outside factors, each paired with a test. ### Part 2 — Fix it Assume your investigation points to a likely cause. Describe what you would change, how you would prioritize and test the changes, and which metrics would show the fix worked. ```hint Match the fix to the finding A homepage that overwhelms members, a catalog gap and a playback bug each need different owners and fixes. Decide how you would test each change and what must not get worse. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Fixes mapped to specific root causes. - An experiment design with a primary metric and guardrails. - Prioritization by expected impact, confidence and effort. ### What a Strong Answer Covers - An ordered, structured investigation rather than a list of guesses. - Recognition that more time on the homepage can signal friction, not satisfaction. - Use of segments and the viewing funnel to localize the problem. - A clear link from each root cause to its fix and to the metric that confirms it. ### Follow-up Questions - The pattern turns out to be concentrated among members who joined in the last month. How does that change your hypotheses and fixes? - Previews that play automatically on the homepage add to browsing time. How would you decide whether they help or hurt viewing? - What should the homepage's primary success metric be so that a pattern like this is caught earlier?