Debug a spike in complaints from document workers on Express

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 Express supports document workers who create, edit, brand, export, and share business documents such as flyers, reports, presentations, PDFs, social assets, and marketing collateral. A recent spike in complaints from this segment suggests that something in the document workflow may be failing, slowing down, confusing users, or no longer meeting expectations.

In this RCA interview, your task is to frame how you would investigate the complaint spike. Focus on defining the anomaly, identifying which users and workflows are affected, validating whether the issue is real or instrumentation-driven, and developing hypotheses that can be tested with product, support, operational, and qualitative evidence.

You should assume the issue could involve any part of the Express document-worker experience: importing files, editing layouts, using templates, applying brand assets, collaborating, exporting to PDF or other formats, using AI-assisted features, performance, permissions, billing/access, or integrations with enterprise and productivity tools. The goal is not to jump to a fix, but to show a structured diagnostic approach that would help Adobe quickly understand severity, root cause, and mitigation options.

The experience should consider:

- How to define the complaint spike, including baseline period, complaint rate, volume, severity, and affected denominator

- Segmentation by user type, plan, geography, device, browser/app version, workspace type, enterprise vs. individual account, and document workflow stage

- Instrumentation checks to confirm whether the spike reflects a real user problem versus changes in support tagging, feedback collection, release logging, or traffic mix

- Key hypotheses across product changes, performance regressions, export/import quality, collaboration issues, AI feature behavior, permissions, templates, or integrations

- Evidence sources such as support tickets, in-product feedback, session funnels, error logs, latency metrics, release timelines, experiment exposure, and user research

- How to prioritize investigation based on user impact, business impact, reproducibility, frequency, and risk to trust in professional document workflows

- Immediate mitigation options, communication needs, and escalation paths while the root cause is still being confirmed

- Prevention mechanisms such as monitoring, alerting, release guardrails, QA coverage, and clearer ownership for document-worker workflows

Your goal is to demonstrate a clear RCA approach that would help Adobe isolate what changed, who is affected, how serious the issue is, and what actions should be taken to restore confidence for document workers using Express.