Root cause a sudden decline in retention among students using Photoshop

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Adobe is a creative, document, and marketing software company; its products include Creative Cloud, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Adobe Express, Firefly, and Experience Cloud.

Adobe has observed a sudden decline in retention among students using Photoshop. In this interview, you are asked to investigate the drop as a product RCA: clarify what “retention” means, determine whether the decline is real, identify where it is concentrated, and build evidence-backed hypotheses for what may have changed in the student experience.

Focus on students as a distinct segment, including possible differences across education plans, trial users, campus licensing, geography, device type, skill level, academic calendar timing, and creative use cases. Consider the Photoshop workflow end to end: onboarding, learning, file creation, editing, generative AI features, collaboration, exporting, subscription/payment flows, and cross-product handoffs within Creative Cloud.

You should not jump directly to a fix. The emphasis is on how you would structure the investigation, isolate causes, validate or disprove hypotheses, and decide what immediate mitigations or follow-up analyses are needed.

The experience should consider:

- How retention is defined, including time window, denominator, active-use threshold, and whether it is measured by account, device, subscription, or license seat

- Whether the decline is a true behavioral change versus a data, tracking, billing, entitlement, or cohort-mix issue

- Segmentation by student type, plan type, tenure, geography, platform, app version, acquisition channel, school calendar, and usage intensity

- Funnel and workflow breakpoints such as install, login, file open, editing sessions, save/export, AI feature usage, collaboration, and renewal

- Product, pricing, policy, performance, or UX changes that may have coincided with the retention drop

- External factors such as competitor tools, academic seasonality, curriculum shifts, device constraints, or changes in student creative workflows

- Evidence needed from analytics, logs, surveys, support tickets, app store reviews, cancellation reasons, and qualitative student research

- Mitigation, monitoring, and prevention steps once the most likely root cause is identified

The goal is to demonstrate a rigorous RCA approach that can separate signal from noise, narrow the problem to specific student cohorts or workflows, and guide Adobe toward confident next actions without prematurely prescribing a solution.