Medium customer happiness index: which metrics to use and how to combine them

You are a product manager at Medium, the online publishing platform where people write and read stories. You are asked to calculate a happiness index for Medium's customers. Which metrics would you use to build it, and how would they come together into one index? ```hint Start from what a happy customer does For the customer group you pick, describe what someone who is genuinely happy with Medium does differently from someone who merely shows up, before you name a single metric. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Who counts as a customer here: readers, writers, paying members, or all of them in one score? - Should the index measure satisfaction with the product itself, rather than the mood or tone of what gets published? - What will the index be used for: a company-level health metric reviewed regularly, a goal for one product team, or an early warning of churn? - Does it need to cover the website and the mobile apps alike? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A definition of happiness for the chosen customer group, and why that group comes first - Candidate metrics tied to the moments in the customer's journey where Medium delivers or fails to deliver value, each with a reason it reflects satisfaction rather than mere activity - A method for turning several metrics into one index: normalization, weighting, cadence and the unit it is computed for - Metrics that could rise while customers become less happy, and how the index guards against them - How the index would be validated and acted on ### Follow-up Questions - If the index rose while paid-membership renewals fell, how would you interpret it and what would you check? - How would you show that the index predicts whether a customer will still be active, or still paying, months later? - How would the index change if it had to cover writers as well as readers?