Selecting 500 of 1,000 U.S. Restaurants to Onboard Without Comparable Data
Company: Zomato
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product / Decision Making
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
The year is 2014 and you are a product manager at Zomato. Your team is already three weeks behind schedule. You have a list of 1,000 restaurants located across the United States, but nothing that lets you compare them: no metrics and no market data. You need to pick 500 of them to onboard. How would you decide which 500?
```hint Define a good launch first
Before ranking any restaurant, decide what a person using the app in one place needs to see for the launch to count as useful, and what your team can realistically finish now that it is behind.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- What does onboarding mean here: creating a complete listing (menu, photos, hours) on the discovery app, or signing the restaurant as a business partner?
- Is 500 a hard cap for this launch, or the first wave, with the other 500 to follow later?
- Is the launch date fixed, and what is causing the three-week slip: onboarding capacity, slow responses from restaurants, or something else?
- Even without comparable metrics, can the team collect quick facts about each restaurant, such as its location, cuisine, price range, or whether its menu is available online?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A selection tied to an explicit launch goal and to how a local restaurant-discovery product becomes useful in a given area
- A way to choose without comparable data: deciding where to concentrate, cheap facts the team can observe, and a simple scoring rule applied quickly
- Execution under the delay: onboarding throughput, ease of onboarding, waves, reserves, and what scope to cut
- Using the first wave's results as the data the team currently lacks
- Risks of the approach, such as favoring chains or easy restaurants, and how the delay is communicated
### Follow-up Questions
- Two weeks in, a third of the restaurants you chose have not responded. What do you change?
- How would your choice of 500 differ if the goal were revenue from restaurant partners rather than user adoption?
- What would you tell leadership about the delay, and what scope would you trade to recover time?
Overview: An execution question set in 2014: a team three weeks behind schedule must choose 500 of 1,000 U.S. restaurants to onboard with no comparable metrics or market data. It tests goal setting, prioritization when data is missing, delivery under a schedule slip, and using early results to guide later choices.