Product Design of a Restaurant Data Integration API for Uber Eats

You are a product manager at Uber Eats. Restaurants need a programmatic way to send their own data into the Uber Eats platform. Design the APIs that make this possible: who would use them, what they would let restaurants send, how an integration would work from setup to day-to-day updates, and how you would know the API product is succeeding. ```hint Who writes the code? Most restaurants have no engineers of their own. Think about who actually builds and runs these integrations, and about what goes wrong for a diner when a restaurant's information in the app falls out of date. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Which restaurants should the APIs serve first: large chains with their own engineering teams, or independent restaurants that run on a point-of-sale or online-ordering system? - Which data is in scope: menus, prices and photos; opening hours and item availability; or also updates on orders, such as accepting an order or marking it ready for pickup? - Do restaurants already maintain this data by hand in a dashboard or tablet, and should the APIs replace that or work alongside it? - How deep should the design go: product requirements and capabilities, or down to endpoints and payloads? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - The APIs' real users and the concrete problems that manual or stale restaurant data causes for diners, couriers and restaurants. - A prioritized, phased scope of the data the APIs carry, justified by its impact on orders. - Integration design at a product level: resources, update patterns, validation, authorization, versioning and error handling. - Onboarding and developer experience for the partners who build integrations. - Success metrics for the API as a product, with guardrails on data accuracy, reliability and the diner experience. ### Follow-up Questions - A chain pushes a price change to thousands of locations and part of the batch fails validation. How should the API behave, and what does the chain see? - Would you start by building integrations with the largest point-of-sale providers or by opening the APIs to any developer? What would change your mind? - Diners keep ordering items that turn out to be sold out. Which part of your design addresses this, and how would you show that it improved?