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 can show growth in viewing, sign-ups, trials, app opens, or subscriptions that looks positive at the top line but may not create durable value for Prime members or Amazon. In this metrics interview, you are asked to define how you would detect whether Prime Video growth is unhealthy rather than simply high.

Assume you are working with product, finance, content, marketing, and data science teams across Prime Video, Prime membership, devices, and commerce. Growth could come from campaigns, content launches, bundled Prime membership, international expansion, device distribution, pricing changes, or recommendation changes. Your task is to build a measurement approach that distinguishes sustainable engagement and retention from growth driven by low-quality acquisition, poor experience, inflated usage, cannibalization, fraud or abuse, or economics that weaken the Prime flywheel.

You should focus on how you would define the core health of Prime Video growth, what data you would inspect, how you would segment users and traffic, and how you would make the metric system useful for decisions without overreacting to normal seasonality or content-release spikes.

The experience should consider:

- Clear definitions of “growth” and “unhealthy growth” for Prime Video, including the numerator, denominator, and time window.

- How Prime members, non-Prime viewers, trial users, household profiles, devices, geographies, and acquisition channels should be separated into meaningful cohorts.

- Instrumentation needed across subscription events, playback behavior, search and discovery, content consumption, churn, refunds, customer support, and billing.

- Guardrail metrics for customer experience, content quality, retention, monetization, cost to serve, and broader Prime membership impact.

- Ways to identify whether apparent growth is caused by durable engagement, temporary content spikes, marketing spend, accidental usage, sharing abuse, or measurement issues.

- How to compare new versus existing users, high-frequency versus low-frequency viewers, and Prime Video-only engagement versus broader Prime ecosystem behavior.

- How the metrics would support action by product, marketing, content, and finance teams, including when to investigate, pause, scale, or redesign a growth lever.

The goal is to present a rigorous metrics framework that helps Amazon detect when Prime Video growth is creating long-term customer and business value versus when it is masking retention, quality, economic, or trust problems.