How would you detect unhealthy growth in Meta Quest

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Meta is a social technology company; its products include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Quest, creator tools, and ads.

Meta Quest is growing across hardware adoption, VR/MR app usage, social experiences, and creator-led content. Not all growth is healthy: spikes in usage, creator activity, installs, sharing, or monetization could reflect low-quality engagement, spammy incentives, unsafe content, bot-like behavior, novelty effects, or value shifting from one part of the ecosystem to another.

In this metrics interview, you are asked to define how you would detect “unhealthy growth” for Meta Quest, with particular attention to creators and the broader Quest ecosystem. You should clarify what healthy growth means, what outcomes matter for users, creators, developers, and Meta, and how you would distinguish durable ecosystem expansion from misleading or harmful metric movement.

Your answer should focus on building a measurement approach that would help product leaders make decisions: whether to investigate, change ranking or discovery systems, adjust creator incentives, pause a launch, tighten integrity controls, or redefine success metrics.

The experience should consider:

- The primary growth metric being evaluated and its denominator, such as active Quest users, new device activations, creator uploads, content consumption, sessions, purchases, or social interactions.

- How to separate healthy growth from unhealthy growth across cohorts, including new versus retained users, first-time creators versus established creators, regions, content categories, acquisition channels, and device generations.

- Instrumentation needed to detect suspicious or low-quality behavior, including creator activity, viewer engagement, retention, reporting, moderation outcomes, monetization, refunds, and social graph signals.

- Guardrail metrics for safety, trust, content quality, creator ecosystem health, user well-being, and platform integrity.

- Leading versus lagging indicators, including whether short-term engagement is translating into repeat use, creator retention, meaningful social interaction, and sustainable monetization.

- How to identify metric inflation, cannibalization, incentive gaming, bot activity, spam, duplicate accounts, or content that drives engagement while degrading user trust.

- How the metrics would be used operationally, including thresholds, dashboards, alerts, deep dives, experiment readouts, and decision-making forums.

The goal is to present a rigorous metrics framework that detects when Meta Quest growth is not creating durable value, while giving product, integrity, creator, and leadership teams enough evidence to diagnose the issue and decide what action to take.