How would you detect unhealthy growth in Prime Video

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Amazon is a commerce, logistics, media, devices, and cloud company; its products include Marketplace, Prime, Prime Video, Alexa devices, ads, fulfillment, and AWS. Prime Video is Amazon's streaming video service; its products include movies, series, live sports, rentals, channels, recommendations, downloads, and ad-supported viewing.

Prime Video is growing within the broader Amazon Prime ecosystem, where video engagement can influence member satisfaction, retention, commerce behavior, and content investment decisions. The question asks you to define how a PM should detect whether apparent growth is truly healthy customer value creation or whether it is masking quality issues, inefficient spend, low-intent engagement, abuse, or short-lived spikes.

Assume you are evaluating growth among Prime members using product, content, subscription, and customer experience data. You should think beyond top-line viewing or subscriber numbers and consider whether growth is durable, profitable, customer-positive, and aligned with Amazon’s long-term flywheel.

Your task is not to design a new feature, but to define a metrics and monitoring approach that can distinguish healthy growth from unhealthy growth. Be explicit about what “growth” means, what “unhealthy” could mean in this context, how you would measure it, and how the metrics would help leaders make decisions.

The experience should consider:

- The primary growth metrics for Prime Video and their precise denominators, such as Prime members, active viewers, households, profiles, or paid add-on users

- Quality and retention indicators that show whether increased usage is translating into sustained customer value

- Cohorts and segments to compare, including new vs. existing Prime members, regions, devices, content types, acquisition sources, and membership tenure

- Instrumentation needed to separate intentional viewing from passive, accidental, fraudulent, or low-quality engagement

- Guardrail metrics across customer satisfaction, churn, playback quality, content costs, support contacts, refunds, and broader Prime ecosystem impact

- Leading vs. lagging indicators that would help detect problems before they affect long-term retention or economics

- How to interpret trade-offs when one metric improves while another deteriorates, such as watch time increasing while satisfaction or renewal intent declines

The goal is to demonstrate that you can build a decision-useful metric framework for Prime Video growth: one that identifies whether growth is sustainable, customer-obsessed, economically sound, and trustworthy enough to guide product, content, marketing, and operational decisions.