Yelp Review Metrics: North Star, Supply, Quality and Trust Guardrails

Yelp lists local businesses such as restaurants, salons and home-service providers. Users rate those businesses on a five-star scale and write reviews, and other users read the reviews to decide where to go. You are the product manager responsible for reviews. How would you define success for this feature? Name the metric you would treat as the north star, the supporting metrics you would track and the guardrails you would watch, and explain your choices. ```hint Follow one review end to end Trace a single review from the person who writes it to the person who reads it. If the review did its job, what does the reader do next, and which of those signals can Yelp actually observe? ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Should this cover every business category, or focus on one such as restaurants or home services, where how often people use a business and how much is at stake differ a lot? - Should success center on the people reading reviews, the people writing them, or Yelp's business results such as advertising revenue? - Does a star rating with no written text count as a review here, or only reviews with text? - Is this for the mobile app, the website or both, and for every market Yelp serves? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Why reviews matter to readers, writers, businesses and Yelp itself, and which of these groups the definition of success centers on. - One north-star metric with a precise definition, compared against plausible alternatives. - Supporting metrics for review supply, coverage across listings and categories, and review quality. - Guardrails for trust: fake, incentivized or abusive reviews, fairness to businesses, and whether ratings stay informative. - Trade-offs such as volume versus depth, and segmentation by category, region and listing maturity so averages do not hide gaps. ### Follow-up Questions - A prompt asking users to rate places they recently visited raises review volume, but the share of reviews with meaningful text falls. Is that a success? - How would your success metrics differ for a busy restaurant with many reviews versus a newly listed plumber with none? - Your north star drops for two weeks in a row. How would you work out whether reviews got worse or something else changed?