Investigate why conversion fell after a Premium 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 a new Premium experience, and the conversion rate from eligible users into paid Premium subscriptions has fallen unexpectedly after launch. You are asked to investigate the drop as a product manager, focusing on whether the decline is caused by the launch itself, changes in user behavior, measurement issues, traffic mix, pricing/package perception, competitive pressure, or another factor.

The investigation should be grounded in Spotify’s ecosystem across music, podcasts, audiobooks, ads, and creator-driven discovery. Consider both listener-facing conversion flows and creator-influenced acquisition paths, where users may discover Premium through content, recommendations, promotions, or creator-related surfaces before deciding whether to subscribe.

Your task is not to propose a full growth strategy upfront, but to structure a clear root-cause analysis: define the anomaly, identify where in the funnel conversion changed, determine which user segments or markets are affected, validate whether the data is trustworthy, and outline what evidence would confirm or reject key hypotheses.

The experience should consider:

- The exact conversion metric being investigated, including numerator, denominator, time window, and pre/post-launch comparison period

- Funnel stages such as Premium awareness, plan page visits, offer eligibility, checkout start, payment completion, trial start, and paid activation

- Segmentation by geography, platform, acquisition channel, user tenure, free vs returning users, creator-driven traffic, and content type exposure

- Instrumentation checks for event logging, attribution, experiment assignment, eligibility logic, payment tracking, and reporting delays

- Launch-related changes such as pricing, packaging, trial terms, messaging, UI flow, localization, payment methods, or offer availability

- External or contextual factors, including seasonality, competitor campaigns, creator campaigns, app releases, outages, or regulatory/payment constraints

- Evidence needed to distinguish correlation from causation, including cohorts, holdouts, A/B test readouts, and historical baselines

- Mitigation and prevention paths, including rollback criteria, targeted fixes, monitoring, and post-launch alerting

The goal is to demonstrate how you would lead a disciplined RCA for a Premium conversion decline at Spotify: isolate the affected population, validate the measurement, prioritize hypotheses, define the analyses you need, and translate findings into clear next steps without jumping prematurely to a solution.