Root-Cause a 10% Decline in Amazon Website Users and Plan the Response

You are a product manager at Amazon. The team has just reported that the number of users on an Amazon website is down 10%. Explain how you would work out what is behind the decline and what you would do about it. The interviewer will answer your clarifying questions as you go. Show the order in which you would test explanations, the evidence that would confirm or rule out each one, and the response you would recommend once the cause is known. ```hint Find where the users went missing Before listing causes, make sure the drop is real, then locate it: which platforms, countries, traffic sources or user groups account for the missing users, and when it started. The slice that moved narrows the causes worth testing. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - How is a "user" counted here: unique visitors, signed-in shoppers, or customers who placed an order, and over what time window? - Did the 10% fall appear within a day or two or build up over weeks, and which baseline is it compared with: the prior week or the same period last year? - Is this one country's storefront and only the website, or does the number also include visitors using the Amazon shopping app? - Is the drop spread evenly across devices, regions and traffic sources, or concentrated in one of them? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Confirming the drop is real: tracking, metric definitions and reporting pipelines checked against independent sources before any cause is chased - Localizing the decline by timing, platform, geography, traffic source and user type, and reading what each pattern implies - A structured set of internal causes (releases, outages, experiments, sign-in problems, marketing or search changes) and external ones (seasonality, competitors, search engine changes, wider events), tested in order of likelihood and cost to check - Remedies tied to each confirmed cause, sized by the impact on orders and revenue, plus how recovery is verified - Prevention: monitoring and release safeguards that would catch a similar drop sooner ### Follow-up Questions - The missing users all used to arrive through paid search ads. What do you check next, and how do you decide whether to buy that traffic back? - The decline is limited to one mobile platform and began right after last week's release. Do you roll back at once or investigate first? - How would you tell a normal dip after a big sales event apart from users actually moving to a competitor?