Diagnose and Fix a Sudden Rise in Missing-Item Food Orders at Zomato
Company: Zomato
Role: Product Manager
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Zomato sees a sudden spike in food orders that reach customers incomplete, with one or more items missing. As the product manager, find out what is driving the spike and propose how to fix it, both right away and for the longer term.
```hint Follow the order's path
Missing items can enter at any step between the customer placing the order and the bag reaching the door, and each step involves a different party. Trace those steps and find where the new cases are concentrated before choosing a fix.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- How is a partial delivery counted: customer reports of missing items, refunds issued, or also cases where the restaurant removed an unavailable item after the order was placed?
- How large is the spike, when did it start, and was it a sudden step or a quick climb?
- Is it spread across all cities, or concentrated in certain areas, restaurants or dishes?
- Were there any releases to the customer, restaurant or delivery partner apps, or changes to the refund policy, around the time it started?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Checking whether the spike is real or caused by a change in how issues are reported or counted, before looking for operational causes.
- Breaking the rise down by city, restaurant, item, delivery partner, customer cohort and app version to find where it is concentrated.
- Hypotheses across restaurant partners, delivery partners, customers and the platform's own apps, each with the data that would confirm or rule it out.
- Fixes matched to the confirmed cause, separating immediate containment from lasting prevention.
- Metrics that confirm the fix worked, with guardrails so honest customers and partners are not penalized.
### Follow-up Questions
- The spike is concentrated in orders where one delivery partner carried several orders at once. What do you check, and what do you change?
- Missing-item claims rose right after reporting a problem became a one-tap action. How do you separate real misses from abuse without punishing honest customers?
- How would you hold restaurants accountable for missing items without pushing them off the platform?
Overview: A product analytics question about a sudden rise in Zomato food orders that arrive with items missing. It tests whether a candidate validates the metric first, localizes the spike across restaurants, delivery partners, customers and app releases, confirms causes with data, and proposes targeted fixes with guardrails.