Uber Eats Product Sense: Helping Customers Find the Right Restaurant Faster
Company: Uber
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Uber. How would you make restaurant search better? Treat this as the search experience in the Uber Eats app, where customers look for a restaurant or a dish to order. Decide which customers and which search situations to focus on, propose improvements, choose what you would build first, and explain how you would measure whether it worked.
```hint Not every search has a destination
Some customers open the app already knowing the restaurant they want, while others only know a dish or a mood. Work out which kind of search fails most often before you propose features.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "restaurant search" mean only the typed search box, or also the cuisine shortcuts, filters and browse lists customers use to find a place?
- Should the improvement cover delivery orders only, or pickup orders as well?
- Which outcome matters most here: more orders that start from search, a shorter time from first query to checkout, or fewer searches that end without an order?
- Are sponsored restaurant listings in search results a constraint the design must keep?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A goal for search tied to the Uber Eats marketplace of customers, restaurants and couriers, with a success metric that follows from it.
- A chosen customer segment and search situation, with the specific pain points that segment hits from query to order.
- Concrete search improvements (query understanding, ranking, result presentation, filters), prioritized with explicit criteria.
- Success metrics with guardrails covering delivery time, restaurant fairness and search latency.
- Risks and trade-offs, such as relevance versus sponsored placement.
### Follow-up Questions
- Your top improvement raises search conversion, but average delivery time rises because customers now pick restaurants farther away. What do you do?
- How would you evaluate a new ranking approach offline before exposing it to customers in an A/B test?
- How should search treat a newly opened restaurant that has no order history yet?
Overview: A product sense question for Uber product managers about improving restaurant search in the Uber Eats app. It tests choosing a customer segment and search situation, finding pain points along the search journey, prioritizing improvements, and defining success metrics with marketplace guardrails.