Define a North Star and Success Metrics for Uber's Grocery Delivery Business
Company: Uber
Role: Product Manager
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Uber offers grocery delivery alongside its ride and restaurant delivery businesses. You are the product manager responsible for grocery. How would you measure whether it is succeeding? Define what success means for this business, choose the primary metric you would steer by, and lay out the supporting and guardrail metrics around it.
```hint What makes one grocery order a failure
Think about how often a household naturally buys groceries, and what can ruin a grocery order even when it arrives on time. Both should shape the metric you choose and its time window.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is grocery a separate app or a section inside the existing Uber and Uber Eats apps, and which markets are in scope?
- Is the business newly launched and chasing share, or established and expected to improve its unit economics?
- Whose success counts: the people placing orders, the grocery stores, the couriers who shop and deliver, or the business as a whole?
- Do grocery orders share the same courier pool as restaurant orders, so that the two compete for the same people at peak times?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A stated goal tied to why Uber is in grocery, and how that goal drives the choice of metric.
- A primary metric that reflects value actually delivered, measured over a window that fits how often people buy groceries.
- Supporting metrics for every side of the marketplace: customers, stores and couriers.
- Grocery-specific quality measures such as item availability and order accuracy, plus per-order economics.
- Guardrails that catch harm to Uber's restaurant delivery business or to marketplace health.
### Follow-up Questions
- Your primary metric is up 15 percent, but the share of orders with a missing item is rising too. What do you do?
- How would you tell whether grocery growth is new demand or existing Uber Eats spending that simply moved categories?
- If leadership allows only three metrics on the dashboard, which do you keep, and why?
Overview: A product metrics question about defining success for Uber's grocery delivery business. It tests choosing a primary metric that fits weekly grocery habits, covering customers, stores and couriers, and adding order-quality, unit-economics and cannibalization guardrails.