Instacart Product Case: A Plan to Raise Retention on the Grocery Marketplace

Imagine you are a product manager at Instacart and you have been asked to raise retention. What would you do? ```hint Find where people leave Before proposing features, sketch the order journey and look for the step, and the group, at which people stop coming back. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Whose retention: customers ordering groceries, the shoppers who fulfill orders, retail partners or advertisers? - Is retention falling, or is the aim to lift a steady baseline? - How is retention measured here: ordering again within a set window, renewing the paid membership, or something else? - Should paid members and non-members be treated as separate problems? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A chosen side of the marketplace and a precise definition of retention, with the reasons - A diagnosis of where in the order journey people drop off and the data that would confirm it - A focus segment, with solutions tied to the specific reasons that segment leaves - Prioritization of the ideas by impact, confidence and effort - Success metrics, guardrails and an experiment that tells lasting retention apart from a short-lived bump ### Follow-up Questions - If the problem were shoppers leaving the platform rather than customers, how would your approach change? - An incentive lifts 30-day retention but 90-day retention is flat. What do you conclude, and what do you do next? - How would you tell a retention drop caused by the product apart from one caused by customers going back to shopping in stores?