Root-Cause Plan: Sudden Drop in Voice Checkout Conversion (Alexa Shopping)

You are informed that the "voice checkout conversion" KPI for Alexa Shopping has suddenly dropped.

Task

Walk through your end-to-end approach, covering:

1. Precise problem definition
   • Clarify the KPI definition and the time of onset.
   • Identify scope: locales, devices, intents/flows, cohorts, and segments affected.
2. Hypothesis generation and prioritization
   • Consider ASR/NLU errors, payment tokenization failures, catalog/availability, latency/timeouts.
   • Add other plausible factors (authentication, address selection, traffic mix, experiments).
   • Prioritize by impact and plausibility.
3. Causal graph
   • Lay out a causal graph from utterance to order, showing potential failure paths and confounders.
4. Analyses and diagnostics
   • Funnel breakpoint analysis.
   • Feature flag diffs and holdback comparisons.
   • Recent deploy/config/model diffs across services.
   • Switchback or rollback test design to validate causality.
5. Short-term mitigations
   • Propose immediate actions (e.g., feature rollback, circuit breakers, kill switches) to stop the bleed.
6. Long-term fixes
   • Propose durable product/ML/infra/process improvements to prevent recurrence.
7. Stakeholder persuasion and execution
   • Structure a decision document.
   • Quantify impact and benefits.
   • Address risks with guardrails; secure alignment.
   • Define owner-by-owner action items.
8. Measuring success and prevention
   • Define success metrics post-fix.
   • Propose dashboards, anomaly alerts, and a postmortem plan with clear owners.