Product design for diners: improve the journey from choosing a place to paying

How would you make the experience of dining better for people? Decide where you would focus, then describe the product you would build. ```hint Walk the meal step by step A meal has several stages before, during and after the food arrives. Pick one kind of diner and find the stage where they lose the most time or patience before you design anything. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is this about eating out at restaurants, ordering in, or cooking and eating at home, or is the scope my choice? - Am I designing a digital product, or can the improvement be a change inside the restaurant itself, such as staffing or layout? - Should I build for diners only, or must restaurants also benefit, given that many fixes need them to adopt something? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A stated scope for where the meal happens and a deliberate choice of one diner segment, with the reason it beat the others - Pain points mapped to the stages of the meal and ranked by how often and how badly they hit that segment - Solutions to the top pain points, prioritized by impact against effort, including what restaurants would have to adopt - A success metric tied to meals that actually happen and go well, with guardrails for both diners and restaurants - Risks such as cold start with restaurants, no-shows and the privacy of dietary or health information ### Follow-up Questions - Your solution needs restaurants on board. How would you get the first ones in a single city to adopt it? - If bookings through the product rise but restaurants report more no-shows, what would you change? - How would your design differ for a family with young children rather than the segment you chose?