Courier dispatch design for a newly launched food delivery app
Company: Walmart Labs
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are the PM for a food delivery app that has only recently launched. Design the system that decides which courier gets each order for the last-mile trip from the restaurant to the customer.
```hint Let the stage shape the design
A young delivery app has few couriers, thin order density and almost no history on prep or travel times. Ask which assignment decisions a simple rule can handle today and which only pay off once volume and data grow.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Are couriers independent contractors who can decline an offer, or scheduled staff who must take what they are given?
- How many orders and active couriers does the launch area see at peak, and how spread out are the restaurants and customers?
- What matters most right now: delivery time for customers, courier earnings and retention, or cost per delivery?
- Can one courier carry more than one order at a time, and do restaurants share a prep-time estimate when they accept an order?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- The parties the system serves (customers, couriers, restaurants, the operations team) and the goal chosen for an app with thin supply and demand.
- The assignment logic: when an order is offered, which signals pick the courier, and how declines, timeouts and "no courier available" are handled.
- A staged plan that starts with simple rules and a manual fallback, and adds batching, prediction and optimization only when volume and data justify them.
- Success metrics and guardrails that balance on-time delivery, courier utilization and earnings, and cost per order.
- Risks such as couriers waiting at restaurants, uneven order distribution and over-engineering too early.
### Follow-up Questions
- Order volume grows much faster than the courier pool. What would you change in the assignment logic first?
- Couriers complain that a few colleagues get all the best orders. How would you check whether the system is unfair, and what would you change?
- When would you switch from assigning orders one at a time to batching several orders per courier, and how would you test that it helps?
Overview: A product design question about how a newly launched food delivery app should decide which courier takes each order on the last-mile trip. It tests dispatch timing, courier offer flows, fallbacks when supply is thin, a roadmap that grows with order density, and metrics that balance delivery speed, courier earnings and cost.