Grocery App Product Design: Shaping Referral Invites and Rewards

You are the product manager for a grocery app. Design a referral program for it: explain what the program is for, how customers would invite people they know, what reward is earned and at what point, and how you would tell whether the program is working. ```hint Define what earns the reward Decide what a referred person has to do before anyone is rewarded, and check whether that action shows they actually experienced what the app offers rather than merely creating an account. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is the program meant mainly to win new customers, bring back lapsed ones, or raise how often existing customers order? - Does the app deliver groceries, offer store pickup, or both, and does it operate in one city or several? - Does a referral program exist today, or is this being built from scratch? - What do other channels currently pay to acquire a customer, and is there a fixed budget for rewards? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A goal for the program and why referrals suit grocery buying in particular - Separate needs for the person who refers and the person who is referred, with a chosen target group - End-to-end mechanics: where sharing starts, the channels, how a referral is tracked, the qualifying action and the reward, sized against acquisition cost and order economics - Abuse, operational and customer-experience risks, with mitigations - Success metrics with guardrails, and how the program is tested before a wide launch ### Follow-up Questions - How would you separate customers the program truly added from ones who would have joined anyway? - If many referred customers stop ordering once their discount is used, what would you change? - How would the design differ in a city where delivery slots are already scarce?