Define success metrics for content recommendation feed serving families

Problem Statement Description

You are evaluating a content recommendation feed designed for family use, where multiple people in a household may discover, share, resume, approve, or transition content between family members. The business goal is to improve “handoff quality”: how well the feed supports a smooth, trusted transition of content from one family member or session context to another.

In this interview, define the success metrics you would use to determine whether the feed is working well for families. Consider that family accounts may include adults, children, shared devices, different content preferences, parental controls, and moments where one person recommends or queues content for someone else.

Your metrics should be useful for product decision-making, not just reporting. They should help the team understand whether recommendations are relevant, safe, timely, and successfully consumed after a handoff, while avoiding unintended consequences such as over-optimization for engagement at the expense of trust or appropriateness.

The experience should consider:

- A clear definition of “handoff quality” and the user actions that count as a handoff

- The denominator for each metric, such as eligible feed impressions, attempted handoffs, accepted handoffs, or completed consumption sessions

- Instrumentation needed to capture discovery, sharing, acceptance, rejection, resume, completion, and feedback events

- Relevant cohorts, including household type, child versus adult profiles, shared versus individual devices, new versus returning families, and content category

- Leading and lagging indicators that distinguish handoff intent from actual successful consumption

- Guardrail metrics around safety, parental controls, content appropriateness, user trust, fatigue, and negative feedback

- How metrics would support decisions about ranking changes, recommendation quality, personalization, and family-specific product features

The goal is to propose a practical metrics framework that allows a product team to evaluate whether the recommendation feed is creating high-quality family handoffs and to identify where the experience breaks down.