Meituan Dianping · Strategy · Senior · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Meituan grow food and restaurants?

Meituan Dianping is a Chinese local services platform that helps people discover and transact with nearby restaurants and other merchants. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Strategic thinking
Marketplace economics
Growth loops
Monetization design
Prioritization

The situation

The GM of Meituan Dianping's food and restaurant business has asked you for a strategy memo ahead of annual planning. The team sees strong consumer demand for finding places to eat and using local services on mobile, but the category is crowded and several adjacent players lean heavily on reviews and advertising, with mixed business results. Inside Meituan, there is debate about the right growth model for this business. One camp wants to push harder on paid acquisition and merchant monetization now to capture share quickly. Another argues that the company should first strengthen the core product and the marketplace dynamics so growth becomes cheaper and more durable over time. The decision matters because the wrong revenue model could hurt user trust, weaken merchant value, or make the business easy to copy. Your job is to recommend how the food and restaurant business should balance user acquisition, monetization, and defensibility over the next 12 to 18 months, and what to do first versus later.

What to produce

Write a 2 to 3 page strategy memo.

Your answer must

Diagnose the core business problem in marketplace terms, including why review-heavy local services models can struggle to monetize cleanly.
Present 2 to 3 distinct strategic paths for the food and restaurant business, with explicit tradeoffs for consumers, restaurants, and platform economics.
Recommend one path and sequence it over the next 12 to 18 months, including what you would prioritize first and what you would defer.
Describe at least two product-led loops or mechanisms that could reduce customer acquisition cost over time.
Define success metrics that cover acquisition efficiency, monetization quality, and defensibility, including leading indicators and guardrails.

Constraints

Do not rely on large ongoing cash subsidies or brand marketing as the primary growth engine.
Keep the strategy within Meituan Dianping's existing food and restaurant business, no acquisitions or unrelated new business lines.
Protect core user trust and merchant utility, if your plan creates meaningful risk to either, include mitigation.
Assume simple features can be copied quickly by competitors, so the advantage cannot rest only on surface functionality.

Format

Use sections for diagnosis, options, recommendation, roadmap, metrics, and risks.

How Meituan Dianping actually played it

Analyses how the Chinese local services platform gains users at low cost, aligns monetization to its product and builds defensibility, in contrast to review sites that struggle to monetize. Gives a template for analyzing a platform's growth model.

Monetization that fits the product protects the core
Low acquisition cost comes from product-led loops

Built from How a Food and Restaurant Unicorn Nails Acquisition, Monetization and Defensibility by Reforge.