Investigate why conversion fell after a Audiobooks launch

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 has recently launched an Audiobooks experience, expanding beyond music and podcasts into long-form paid audio. Shortly after launch, the team observes a meaningful drop in conversion among creators moving through the audiobook creator workflow, such as onboarding, catalog submission, rights setup, pricing, publishing, or monetization activation.

Your task is to investigate the decline as a root-cause analysis. Treat this as an ambiguous product incident: you need to clarify what “conversion” means, determine whether the drop is real, identify which users or funnel steps are affected, and separate launch-related product issues from measurement, seasonality, traffic mix, or external market factors.

This is not asking for a new product strategy or a redesign. Focus on how you would structure the investigation, what data you would inspect, what hypotheses you would test, and how you would communicate findings and next steps to product, engineering, data, and creator-facing teams.

The investigation should consider:

- The exact conversion metric, numerator, denominator, time window, and expected baseline before the Audiobooks launch

- Funnel segmentation across creator types, geographies, acquisition sources, devices, rights/contract status, content formats, and new versus existing Spotify creators

- Instrumentation checks, including event logging, attribution changes, tracking gaps, experiment exposure, and dashboard definition changes

- Launch-specific hypotheses across onboarding friction, eligibility rules, pricing or payout setup, catalog ingestion, rights verification, review delays, and creator education

- Evidence needed to distinguish product regression from traffic-quality changes, marketing campaign effects, seasonality, or competitor activity

- Severity assessment, including conversion impact, affected creator volume, downstream revenue or catalog supply impact, and user trust implications

- Immediate mitigation options, escalation paths, and communication to internal teams or affected creators

- Longer-term prevention, such as alerting, launch readiness checks, funnel monitoring, and post-launch instrumentation reviews

The goal is to demonstrate a structured RCA approach that can quickly validate the anomaly, isolate the most likely causes, quantify business and creator impact, and guide Spotify toward an informed mitigation and prevention plan.