You notice a spike in the number of user-uploaded videos on your platform in June. What do you think is the cause, and how would you test it?

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You notice a spike in the number of user-uploaded videos on your platform in June. What do you think is the cause, and how would you test it?

Asked at Microsoft over a year ago

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Tushar · Answer 1 · 2020-11-04T20:54:57+0000

An approach to this problem solving interview question...

I am assuming the platform is similar to Youtube where users can upload videos. Interviewer: Yes

Clarify:

Is the spike on a specific channel? web, mobile (IOS/Android) Interviewer: All
Any specific geography? Interviewer: All
Any particular user segment? Interviewer: All
1. Power users: Who upload at least 3 videos per week
2. Frequent users: Who upload 1-2 videos per week
3. Casual users: Who upload 1-2 videos per month
4. Other users: who upload 1-2 videos per year

Goal: The objective is to find the root cause of the spike in video uploads and validate our hypothesis.

Does that sound right? Interviewer: Yes

My approach would be to discuss various potential internal or external factors that may have caused this issue and write off other causes as I drill down to the exact reason. Then I would validate my hypotheses by looking at other relevant metrics. Does that sound good? Interviewer: Yes, please proceed

Internal factors:

Is the metric that measures No. of uploads correct? Has anything changed recently (May/June/July) that may have impacted the way we measure it? Interviewer: No
Any feature that was tested in June that provided new video editing/filters capabilities. This feature may have cultivated interest among users to try it and upload new videos? Interviewer: No
Any promotions offered in June that incentivizes on the basis of no. of video uploads? Interviewer: No
Any new temporary partnerships that were formulated in June with other apps, browser, mobile OEM's to make the platform as default? Interviewer: No
Are the videos duplicate due to a technical glitch. I would see if any feature was launched in May/June that may have triggered this effect of videos being uploaded multiple times. Interviewer: No

External factors

Is the spike seasonal? Did we see the spike last year as well in the month of June? Interviewer: No
Any major global events that may have triggered more video uploads in June: Interviewer: No
1. Elections across many major countries
2. Unfortunate calamity or attack
3. Protests or campaigns: ice-bucket challenge, blacklivesmatter etc
4. Festivals
New hardware flagship launches from apple (mobile and mac), Android (Mobile and Chromebook) etc that have better cameras for enhanced quality and may have triggered the spike. Interviewer: No
Any competitor related issues:
- Competitor platform encountering bad PR, privacy issues, hacked and user information compromised in the month of June? Interviewer: No
1. Regulatory ban on competitors? Interviewer: No
2. Technical glitch on a competitor platform because of which users were not able to upload? Interviewer: Bingo

Thanks for confirming. I believe the technical glitch on the competitors end forced its users (creators) to migrate to our platform. These users may have been using both platforms but were using competitor as the primary platform and ours as secondary with no or few uploads before June. Some others may have been using just the competitor platform to upload videos.

So the users moved to our platform making it primary upload channel and also must have witnessed new users joining the platform. I would look at these metrics:

#/% growth of new users who signed up in June compared to May (D/W/M)- I would take this metric and draw a graph for the last 12 months. There must be a peak for June of this year - Primary
% growth in # of unique IP address (D/W/M) - this can be muddied because users may be just using a different channel or a new phone. There must be a peak for June of this year - Secondary
Increase in DAU, WAU, MAU - There must be a peak for June of this year - Primary

Starting July, the competitor glitch was handled and most of the users who used the competitor as primary earlier went back to competitor. I would expect to see a lingering effect in the month of July as well - compared to DAU, WAU, MAU from May. Also the # of videos uploaded would be more compared to last year in July and compared to May of that year.

If I am the PM at that time, I would see month of June as an opportunity to retain these new or primary platform customers. I would explore the incentivization with marketing (after looking at our revenue model) for the no. of video uploads or points for weekly active session length more than X minutes.

Summary:

I started with clarifying about the spike and then reiterated the goal. I drill down with internal and external factors that may have caused this spike. What we found that the spike was due to the influx of users from the competitor platform and we validated it by looking at the primary metric of #/% growth in new users and increase in DAU. We will also look at the secondary metric of % growth in # of unique IP addresses.

Lastly there is an opportunity to retain these users who migrated to our platform via promotions/incentivization.

Santhosh Kumar · Answer 2 · 2021-09-26T04:36:40+0000

Clarifying questions

A) Platform: Is it across the board or app/pc/mobile web? Answer: Across the board

B) Cohort: Is the user enagement higher for existing customer or both new and existing customers? Answer: Both

C) Geography: Is this phenomenon specific to US or WW? Answer: WW

D) Time reference: Is this spike a sesonal factor or anamoly? Answer: Anamoly

E) Is it a video-sharing socail media platform? Answer: yes

Root causes:

Platform specific drivers:

Performance optimization: We might have improved the performance of the platform that it takes shorter time for the customers to upload the video the platform, leading to more video uploads.

UX enhancements: We might have made UX improvements that made it easier for the new users to upload the content, without involving steep learning curve. For exmaple, new option to create subtitles, dubbing the video in other language, cinema mode etc.

Promotions: We might have run the promotions where we waived the monthly fee across the board, if the platform where previously operating under the freemium model.

Marketing efforts: We might have launched new ad compaign through news, print that drove new user adoption and new content.

PR: We might have generated good PR in the month of June through climate friendly inititiatives or supporitng a social cause that lead to increased user engagement on the platform.

Data issue: We might want to verify that reporting is accurate, to ensure that is truly an anamoly.

OEM partnership: We paid a premium to make the platform default on iphone and samsung phones.

External drivers:

Mass movement: Any occasion that cause the people to people coming together for a cause or celebrate local team victory would lead to the spike in the user-uploaded videos. For example, national movement to support black lives, protest the political policy, celebrate winning the championships,

Competitors: When the competitors start to charge a premimum for the services or face outage or went bankrupt or shut down the business, then customers would resort to alternative platforms such as microsoft to share their content

Search engine optimization: We might have optimized our service for the search results that drove the platform visibility and user adoption and new content generation

Other Referrals: Other social media platforms would have adopted user friendly policies that allow the users to seamless move the content to different platforms.

Free internet/ Low cost handset: Corporations might have launched free/low cost internet/handset that made the platform accessible for low-income segments of the society that led to more content.

Conclusion

We would want to test out all the factors before we zero-in on the driver for the spike.

Kaushik · Answer 3 · 2021-02-27T18:55:22+0000

Clarifying Questions

Assuming the platform is something like YouTube where users can post and view content - Yes
Is this a one-time occurrence or something like this happened last year also? - Is this a seasonal change - No
Is this specific to any geography or have we noticed a spike across the world? - Across the world
Do we have any information about the pattern of uploads - platform, device type etc - nothing specific

We will try to determine if the change is caused due to external or internal factors

External

Ecosystem Level Changes

Is there any movement happening across the world, asking more people to upload more videos on the platform - for example, in the beginning of the pandemic more people began uploading videos on social media platforms - No
Across the various stacks that enable video uploads - better phones, cheaper data, faster data plans, etc. has there been a major change in the market? - No
Is there any marketing campaign running to enable more uploads during the process - No

Regulatory Changes

Is there any government regulation that has been relaxed recently due to which the uploads could have spiked - such as the ban on TikTok for example - TikTok provides more ways for users to create new videos, users could be socializing this across other video sharing platforms - No

Internal

Analytics Related Reasons

Has there been a recent change in instrumentation? - No
Has a previous bug in instrumentation changed? - No
Have we started using a different platform for looking at analytics? - No

Product or Design Related Changes

Have we recently launched in a new market that enabled this? - No
Is there a new product feature that enabled more easy uploads to the platform? - No
Is there a different way in which videos can be uploaded in the product - uploads in comments for example - No

Bugs or Technical Issues

Is there any bug causing videos to be uploaded multiple times? - No
Is there any bug causing video uploads to fail earlier been fixed? - Yes

Solutions

Given that this was a problem that existed prior in the product, I will go back to check why this issue wasn't caught earlier. I will take a few more steps to ensure this doesn't happen again:

Go through the entire funnel and instrumentation to ensure bugs or crashes are logged properly and the product team gets to know about them.
Review the instrumentation and bug tracking systems to see if there are any high-priority bugs that are hurting growth.

Prateek Srivastava · Answer 4 · 2024-09-24T11:37:50+0000

We start by asking clarifying questions:

Do we have any information on the demography of users who uploaded the videos?
Do we know anything about the duration of the videos uploaded.
What is this platform most often used for?

Key assumptions:

Video upload has been observed across demographic groups.
No major change took place on the platform's side.

We identify different internal and external factors that might have contributed to this spike:

Intenal:

The platform incentivised users for uploading short videos.

External:

Any major political event or viral campaign that might have triggered users to upload videos.
Users moving away from competitor portals to our portal because of an outage and uploading their videos.

We need to investigate the causes above to identify the reason for spike. Additionally, we need to test our hypothesis by identifying commonality in content uploaded and user behavior on competitor portals.

A possible recommendation here will be to build technically robust platforms that can handle spike.

To summarize, we begin by asking clarifying questions and then make relevant assumptions. Next we identify possible internal and external causes and frame a hypothesis. After this, we test our hypothesis and make recommendations.