How would you grow key product metrics?

The Scenario

You are a Product Analyst for a mobile photo-sharing application. The product team has noticed that while the total number of daily active users (DAU) is stable, the 'Stories' feature—where users share photos that disappear after 24 hours—has seen a 10% decline in daily content creation over the past month.

Your goal is to increase the number of daily Story creations. Please provide a structured approach to solving this problem by covering the following:

1. Metric Definition & Investigation: Which metrics would you look at to diagnose the decline? How would you segment your user data to identify if this is a systemic issue or isolated to a specific cohort?
2. Hypothesis Generation: Based on your diagnostic approach, propose two distinct hypotheses for why content creation is dropping.
3. Experimentation: Choose one of your hypotheses. Describe how you would design an A/B test to validate it. What is your primary metric, and what guardrail metrics would you track to ensure the health of the overall ecosystem?

Constraints

• Assume you have access to standard event-logging data (e.g., clicks, impressions, timestamps, user ID, device type).
• Keep your solution focused on actionable product changes rather than broad marketing initiatives.

Example Framework

• Investigation: Compare creation rates between new vs. returning users.
• Hypothesis: 'If we simplify the camera upload UI, users will be less intimidated by the creation process.'
• Experiment: Run a split test on the upload interface; primary metric is 'Stories per DAU'.