You walk in to your office and find that Google cloud subscription has gone down by 20%. What do you do as a product manager?

I would go about solving this in the following manner asking clarifying questions as I move to each step.

1. Importance - Does this metric matter?

Is this one of the most important metrics? Users subscribe to the google cloud service for their infra needs.

Hence, % increase/decrease in the number of subscriptions seems to be a direct metric.

2. Time frame -

What is the time frame- Has this dropped over the last hour, day, week or month. The time frame may help us zero on to the root cause behind the fall. Has it been over some specific territory or region?

3. Variance -

How big is 20%? When was there a drop of this magnitude? Is it a stand-alone event or have there been incidences such as this in the past.

Assuming that the subscription hasn't seen such a drop before, this does seem to be a stand-alone but very significant event that needs further exploration

4.  Finding the equation for number of subscribers-

#active subscribers ending this month = #old subscribers + #new subscribers + #re-subscribers

#old-subscribers = #existing-subscribers * retention rate

#re-subscribers = #cancelled-subscribers * acquisition rate

Now, in order for the active subscriptions to go down, any of these buckets may have gone down, or maybe more than one would have gone down.

5. Figure out the reasons why any/each of these levers may have dropped

Old subscribers ➖

This is after there being no tech glitch as such ( downtime, etc)

1. Any recent upgrades or changes that may not have been received well
2. Payment subscription failures Increased, changes in the auto-subscription mechanism
3. Competitive pricing/luring by the competitors
4. Brand image issues
5. Any Regulatory/compliance change

New subscribers ➖

1. Any new products in same space
2. Brand image issues
3. Any changes in onboarding new subscribers

Re-subscribers ➖

1. Increased costs of switching? ( Existing costs to re-subscribe have been increased)

A few clarifying questions to start with to set the table for answering this Google problem solving question:

1. Clarify if this is a collaborative session where you engage the interview through the Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) or if they want to see you think out loud about all the potential causes. 

2. Has this drop been gradual or has this drop happened overnight? 

3. Do they mean daily average new subscription rate (customer acquisition) dropping by 20% or current subscribers failing to renew their subscription (churn rate)? 

4. Understand Metric and has the metric for measuring subscription changed? 

5. Have the analytical tools/process for measuring subscriptions changed? Or has there been any issue with the analytical tools? 

Offer framework of how you'll approach the problem: I will start by examing some external factors and then some internal factors, and walk through the customer journey and try to identify any changes/issues in this.

External factors: 

1. Is this 20% drop in subscription local or global? 

2. Is this any particular cohort/segment of users that have dropped? 

3. Has there been any government backlash (political factors?) or any social backlash on Google? 

4. Have the competitors like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Dropbox, Box, introduced any new offers for customers recently that make them sound more attractive to a customer? 

Internal factors: 

1. Is this all Android, Windows, iOS users?

2. Are these laptops/desktop or mobile users? 

3. Has there been an issue with the server or load balancers for the Google cloud service? 

4. Has there been an environmental issue like floods, hurricanes, etc., that caused the main servers to fail? 

5. DDoS attacks? 

6. Any new feature/product introduced by Google that might cannibalize Google cloud service? 

7. Any new changes deployed? Any bug reports? 

8. Hiked prices? 

Customer journey:

1. Autorenewal (current customers):

 -  The user saves Credit card information/PayPal and the subscription auto-renews. Has there been any issue reported on this feature? 

- Interaction with the cloud: Google ecosystem: workspace, photos, cloud computing, etc., Is any particular product affected or all?

2. New customers: 

- Has the signup process changed? 

- Has the payment process changed? 

- Has the user journey of engaging with the product changed? 

Finally, summarize how you found the problem and how you're going to resolve it.