Retention for marketplace sellers declined in Meta Quest. What is your analysis plan

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Meta is a social technology company; its products include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Threads, Quest, creator tools, and ads.

You are investigating a reported decline in retention among marketplace sellers in Meta Quest. In this context, “sellers” may include developers, studios, creators, or commercial partners who list paid or monetized VR experiences, apps, games, add-ons, or related digital content in the Quest marketplace. The issue matters because seller retention affects catalog depth, buyer choice, ecosystem health, and long-term platform competitiveness.

Your task is to lay out an RCA analysis plan, not to jump directly to a fix. You should define what seller retention means, validate whether the decline is real, identify where the drop is concentrated, and generate hypotheses across product experience, marketplace economics, policy, tooling, buyer demand, platform changes, and external market factors.

The analysis should account for Meta Quest’s two-sided marketplace dynamics: seller success depends not only on seller tools and policies, but also on buyer traffic, discovery, conversion, monetization, device adoption, developer support, and trust in the platform. A strong response should show how you would separate measurement artifacts from actual seller behavior changes and how you would prioritize evidence before recommending action.

The experience should consider:

- How to define seller retention, including denominator, time window, seller activity threshold, and whether retention means logging in, updating listings, publishing new content, maintaining active listings, or generating sales.

- How to frame the anomaly by comparing current retention to historical baselines, seasonality, seller cohorts, marketplace categories, geographies, seller size, tenure, and acquisition source.

- Instrumentation and data-quality checks, including event tracking changes, seller account merges, marketplace taxonomy changes, policy reclassification, dashboard logic, and delayed reporting.

- Segmentation to isolate the decline across new vs. established sellers, high-earning vs. long-tail sellers, game vs. non-game content, App Lab vs. main store, regions, device generations, and monetization models.

- Hypotheses across seller-side friction, such as onboarding, submission review, payout issues, analytics tools, moderation, policy enforcement, discoverability, support response times, and technical SDK or platform changes.

- Buyer-side and marketplace health signals, including Quest device usage, marketplace traffic, search and recommendation changes, conversion rates, refund rates, ratings, reviews, and category demand.

- External and competitive factors, such as developer attention shifting to other platforms, changes in VR market growth, macroeconomic pressure on smaller studios, or competing monetization opportunities.

- Mitigation and prevention planning, including how you would communicate findings, identify owners, monitor leading indicators, and prevent recurrence through dashboards, alerts, and experimentation discipline.

The goal is to present a structured investigation plan that helps Meta determine whether the seller retention decline is a true ecosystem health issue, where it is happening, why it may be happening, and what evidence would be needed before deciding on product, policy, marketplace, or operational interventions.