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.

Meta Quest has observed a decline in retention among marketplace sellers. These sellers may include developers, creators, studios, or businesses that list and manage paid or free experiences, apps, content, or commerce offerings in the Quest ecosystem. Your task is to outline how you would investigate the decline and structure an analysis plan.

Focus on framing the retention anomaly clearly before jumping to explanations. Consider what “seller retention” means in this marketplace context, which seller actions indicate continued engagement, and whether the decline is broad-based or concentrated in specific seller cohorts, geographies, content categories, lifecycle stages, or acquisition channels.

Your analysis should account for the two-sided marketplace dynamics of Meta Quest: seller retention may be affected by buyer demand, discoverability, monetization outcomes, platform tools, policy enforcement, technical issues, competition, or broader VR market shifts. The goal is not to propose a final fix immediately, but to identify the most likely drivers through structured diagnosis.

The experience should consider:

- How to define and validate the retention metric, including denominator, time window, and qualifying seller activity.

- How to confirm the decline is real and not caused by logging, data pipeline, taxonomy, or cohorting changes.

- Relevant segment cuts such as new vs. existing sellers, top vs. long-tail sellers, app category, geography, device generation, seller size, and monetization model.

- Funnel and workflow points for sellers, including onboarding, listing management, content submission, review, publishing, analytics, payouts, support, and re-engagement.

- Marketplace health indicators such as traffic, conversion, installs, revenue, refunds, ratings, buyer retention, and seller earnings.

- Internal or external events that could explain the timing, including product launches, policy changes, ranking changes, fee changes, tooling outages, review delays, seasonality, or competitor moves.

- Evidence needed to prioritize hypotheses, including quantitative analysis, seller feedback, support tickets, qualitative interviews, and operational data.

- Mitigation and prevention considerations, including short-term actions, monitoring, ownership, and alerts to detect future seller retention issues.

Your goal is to present a clear RCA plan that would help a Meta product team determine what changed, who was affected, why it matters, and what evidence is needed before deciding on corrective actions.