Quora PM Metrics: Choosing Three Core Health Metrics for the Q&A Platform

You are a product manager at Quora and can track only three metrics to judge whether the product is healthy. Choose the three, define each one precisely, explain why each beats the alternatives you considered, and describe how the three work together. ```hint Follow one question through its life Trace what has to happen for a question to end up with a good answer that many people read. Check that your three metrics would notice a breakdown at each step, not just more activity at one of them. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Are these metrics for the health of Quora as a whole, or for one product team such as feed ranking or the writer experience? - Should the set include Quora's business results from advertising, or focus on user value with revenue tracked separately? - Do logged-out visitors who arrive from search engines count as users for these metrics, or only signed-in members? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A clear statement of Quora's goal and of how value flows between askers, answer writers and readers. - Three precisely defined metrics (unit, time window, threshold) that together cover demand, the supply and quality of answers, and long-term health, rather than raw activity counts. - Reasons each metric was chosen over obvious alternatives such as questions asked, upvotes or DAU. - Guardrails and segment cuts that catch spam, low-quality content and shifts in search traffic. - Honest limits of each metric, especially the difficulty of measuring answer quality. ### Follow-up Questions - Your quality metric improves while engaged readers fall for three straight weeks. How do you work out what is happening? - How would you measure answer quality without relying on upvotes? - Leadership asks you to swap one of your three metrics for revenue per user. Which would you drop, and what risk does that create?