Smart Refrigerator for a Shared Office Kitchen

Design a refrigerator for use in an office. Decide whose problems it should solve and what those problems are, choose the features the first version launches with, and explain how you would judge whether it is succeeding. ```hint A shared fridge has many users and no owner Unlike a fridge at home, an office fridge is used by many people and looked after by someone else. List everyone who touches it in a typical week and what goes wrong for each of them before you pick features. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Is the fridge for food employees bring from home, for food and drinks the company provides, or both? - How large is the office: a small team sharing one fridge, or a large site with many kitchens and a facilities team? - Who buys it: the office manager, a central workplace team, or a vendor that stocks it? - Are we designing new fridge hardware, or could the answer be sensors and software added to fridges offices already own? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - Identifying the different people who use, maintain and pay for an office fridge, and choosing whose problems come first. - Concrete shared-fridge pain points, such as crowding, missing food, forgotten leftovers, cleanouts and running out of shared staples. - A focused first version whose features map to those pain points, prioritized by impact and effort, with ideas deliberately left out. - A business model that works for an office buyer, and success metrics with guardrails. - Risks such as food safety, privacy if the fridge records whose food is whose, added friction, and what happens when the technology fails. ### Follow-up Questions - How would your design change for a small startup office with one fridge versus a large corporate campus with many kitchens? - If the fridge knows whose food is whose, how do you keep it from feeling like workplace surveillance? - The facilities team will pay for only one feature. Which do you keep, and why?