Healthy Meal Gap in Food Delivery: Deciding Whether to Build and Planning the Launch

You are a product manager on a food delivery app. Users have been saying that the app does not have enough healthy food to choose from. What would your strategy be, and what would you do next? The interviewer wants you to explore two outcomes. In one, your work ends with a decision not to build anything new for this. In the other, you decide to build. Think through the whole product lifecycle and the user's journey through the app. ### Clarifying Questions - Where does the feedback come from (app store reviews, support tickets, surveys, social media), and how much of it is there? - What do users mean by "healthy": lighter meals, high protein, vegetarian or vegan, low sugar, allergen-free, or a general impression? - Are restaurants with healthy dishes missing from the app, or are they present but hard to find? - Is the feedback concentrated in particular cities, times of day or user groups? ### Part 1 — Make sense of the feedback Before choosing a direction, how would you work out what is behind the feedback? Describe how you would size the problem, find out who is affected, and pin down what is actually missing. ```hint Check both sides of the marketplace Compare what users look for and fail to order with what restaurants near them actually sell. The two can point to different problems. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - The sources and volume of the feedback, and which users raise it - Search, browse and order data that reveal unmet demand, compared with menu supply by area - A working definition of "healthy" that can be measured - A decision rule for moving toward building or not building ### Part 2 — The outcome where you do not build Suppose your investigation ends in a decision not to build a dedicated healthy-food product. What findings would justify that call, how would you communicate it, and what would you still do for the users who raised the issue? ```hint Not building is a decision too State the evidence that would make this the right answer, then think about what happens next for the users, restaurants and internal teams who expected something. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - Evidence that would justify not building, including the opportunity cost - Low-cost responses short of a new product, and closing the loop with the people who gave feedback - How the decision is documented, and which signals would reopen it ### Part 3 — The outcome where you build Now suppose the evidence supports building. Take the solution through its lifecycle, from definition and design through launch, growth and iteration, and walk through the user's journey from opening the app to receiving the meal and ordering again. ```hint Map the journey stage by stage List each step a user takes from wanting a healthy meal to reordering it, and find where it breaks today. Remember that restaurants have to supply whatever you surface. ``` #### What This Part Should Cover - A solution matched to the diagnosed gap, for both eaters and restaurants - The user journey stage by stage, with the change at each stage - An MVP, experiment design, rollout and iteration plan - Success metrics with marketplace guardrails ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Treating the feedback as a hypothesis to test rather than a mandate to build - A clear definition of "healthy" for the product, and how labels stay accurate - Marketplace thinking that weighs eaters, restaurants, couriers and the company's economics - An explicit link between the evidence gathered and the build or no-build decision - Lifecycle thinking in both outcomes, including what happens after launch or after saying no ### Follow-up Questions - Restaurants start labeling dishes as healthy to gain visibility, even when they are not. How do you keep labels honest? - Suppose healthy dishes earn restaurants lower margins. How does that shape your metrics and your recommendation? - After launch, many people use the new healthy filter, but orders per user are flat. Is the feature working?