How would you measure product-market fit for Discover Weekly among students

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Spotify is an audio streaming company; its products include music, podcasts, audiobooks, playlists, recommendations, creator tools, subscriptions, and ads.

Spotify wants to understand whether Discover Weekly has strong product-market fit specifically among students. Discover Weekly is a recurring personalized playlist, but students may use music differently from the general population: studying, commuting, socializing, exercising, discovering identity-driven tastes, and managing price sensitivity across free and premium plans.

In this metrics interview, your task is to define how Spotify should measure whether Discover Weekly is meaningfully solving a student need, not just whether students occasionally open the playlist. The measurement should distinguish curiosity or passive exposure from durable value, habit formation, and preference versus competing discovery channels such as TikTok, YouTube Music, Apple Music, or algorithmic radio.

The measurement approach should consider:

- A clear definition of “product-market fit” for Discover Weekly in the student segment.

- The exact student denominator: verified students, inferred student-age users, campus users, free users, premium student-plan users, or another cohort.

- Core engagement, retention, satisfaction, and discovery-value signals that indicate recurring usefulness.

- Instrumentation needed across playlist impressions, starts, skips, saves, shares, follows, downstream listening, and return behavior.

- Cohort cuts by geography, subscription tier, tenure, listening intensity, genre diversity, and school calendar periods.

- Guardrail metrics such as cannibalization of other Spotify surfaces, user fatigue, churn, ad load sensitivity, and creator/listener ecosystem effects.

- How to separate Discover Weekly impact from broader Spotify personalization, marketing, seasonality, and student discount effects.

- How the metrics would inform decisions such as investing further, redesigning the playlist experience, targeting subsegments, or changing distribution.

The goal is to propose a practical measurement framework that helps Spotify determine whether Discover Weekly has a strong, defensible fit with student listeners and whether that fit is deep enough to justify continued product and personalization investment.