Build a metric tree for Photoshop after a major redesign

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Adobe is a creative, document, and marketing software company; its products include Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Adobe Express, Firefly, and Experience Cloud.

Adobe has recently launched a major redesign of Photoshop, with particular importance for student users who are learning creative workflows, completing coursework, building portfolios, and experimenting with newer capabilities such as AI-assisted editing and collaboration. The redesign may affect how easily students start projects, find core tools, complete edits, share work, and develop confidence in Photoshop as a long-term creative product.

Your task is to build a metric tree that helps evaluate whether the redesign is successful. The metric tree should connect high-level product and business outcomes to user behaviors inside Photoshop, while separating adoption, engagement, workflow completion, quality, retention, and monetization where relevant. The focus is not just on listing metrics, but on defining how each metric would be measured and why it is useful for decision-making after the redesign.

Assume the redesign touches multiple parts of the product experience, such as onboarding, workspace layout, tool discovery, document creation, editing workflows, export/share flows, collaboration, and AI-powered features. The metric framework should help Adobe understand both whether students are getting more value from Photoshop and whether any parts of the redesign are introducing friction or harming existing trusted workflows.

The experience should consider:

- The primary north-star or outcome metric for student success in Photoshop, including the denominator and time window.

- A clear hierarchy of input metrics across activation, tool discovery, project creation, editing depth, export/share completion, collaboration, and retention.

- Instrumentation needed to capture redesigned workflow steps, feature usage, drop-offs, errors, undo behavior, latency, and completion events.

- Cohorts such as new students, existing Photoshop users, education-plan subscribers, trial users, different skill levels, device types, and users of AI features versus traditional tools.

- Guardrail metrics for professional trust and usability, including crash rates, performance, failed exports, user frustration signals, support contacts, and churn risk.

- How to distinguish successful engagement from shallow or accidental usage, especially for redesigned UI elements and generative AI features.

- How the metric tree would support decisions about iteration, rollout, rollback, onboarding changes, or additional education-focused product investments.

The goal is to define a practical measurement framework that Adobe’s product team could use after the redesign to understand student value, diagnose where the experience is improving or degrading, and make informed product decisions without relying on vanity metrics alone.