Food Delivery Marketplace Health Metrics and Restaurant Supply-Demand Imbalance Signals

You are the product manager of a food delivery app. Which metrics would you use as the key measures of the business, and which of them would tell you that restaurants and orders are out of balance, with more restaurants than the orders can sustain or too few restaurants to serve the orders coming in? ```hint Look at each side's symptoms Think about what a customer experiences when too few restaurants are available, and what a restaurant experiences when too few orders arrive. Each leaves a different trace in the data, and both vary by neighborhood and hour. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Does the app dispatch its own couriers, or do restaurants deliver themselves? If couriers are ours, should a courier shortage count as part of the imbalance or be tracked separately? - Is the company focused on growing orders and selection, or on profit per order? That choice shapes the north-star metric. - Should balance be judged for a whole city, or for each delivery zone and meal period? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A north-star metric tied to the business goal and broken into demand, restaurant supply and fulfillment drivers - Metrics for customers, restaurants and couriers, with guardrails such as cancellations, late deliveries and refunds - Specific signals of too many restaurants and of too few, defined as rates or capacity-adjusted ratios rather than raw counts - Measuring balance by delivery zone and time of day instead of citywide averages - What each signal would trigger, such as recruiting restaurants or generating demand ### Follow-up Questions - Orders per active restaurant are climbing fast in one zone. How would you tell healthy growth from a restaurant shortage? - If couriers rather than restaurants are the bottleneck, which of your signals would mislead you, and how would you separate the two causes? - How would you set a target number of restaurants for a zone when variety of cuisine matters as much as the count?