Pass 1 — Define what engagement actually means.

Engagement on Spotify is not one thing. Candidate lenses:

Listening time — minutes streamed per user per week. Most obvious, most gameable (users with Spotify playing while asleep).
Breadth — unique artists, tracks, or playlists engaged with. Captures discovery and curiosity.
Active actions — searches, saves, playlist creations, shares. Captures intent, not passive listening.
Frequency — days active per week. Captures habit.
Completion — % of tracks listened past 30 seconds. Captures taste alignment.

Ask the PM: what decision depends on this metric?

Growth team: they want something sensitive to new-user retention.
Product team: they want something that moves when they ship a discovery feature.
Business team: they want something that correlates with paid conversion.

Engagement for a music product is fundamentally different from engagement for a social product, and the definition has to match the use case.

Pass 2 — Propose a composite, with primary + secondary.

Primary (North Star): Weekly active days with ≥30 min of listening. Captures habit (frequency) and meaningful use (duration), but guards against the asleep-listening trap by requiring multiple days.

Secondary / diagnostic:

Active-action rate — % of sessions with at least one save, search, or share. Distinguishes passive from active users.
Breadth — unique tracks per week. Flags users getting stuck on a playlist loop.
Completion rate — % of started tracks finished. Catches recommendation misses.

Pass 3 — Flag the edge cases.

Background listening. Is a user who leaves Spotify on overnight engaged? Most platforms drop session credit after 30 min of no interaction.
Family plans. One account, four listeners. Engagement per account vastly overstates engagement per person.
Podcasts vs. music. Fundamentally different usage patterns — podcasts are longer, less repetitive, with different monetization. Don't pool them.
Free vs. premium. Free users have mandatory ads, which depress apparent listening time even at constant interest. Segment or normalize.
New vs. returning. A new user's first week is not comparable to a power user's 200th — report separately.

What senior answers add: propose a diagnostic dashboard, not a single number. The primary metric is what execs see; the secondary metrics are what analysts and PMs use to figure out why it moved.

Define "engagement" for Spotify.

Draft your answer

Stuck? Peek at a hint

More product metrics questions