Swiggy Instamart · Metrics · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

Instamart cart to order conversion fell

Swiggy Instamart is Swiggy's quick commerce service for groceries and everyday essentials, delivered in minutes. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

root cause analysis
funnel analytics
hypothesis testing
prioritization
business judgment

The situation

You are the PM for checkout at Swiggy Instamart. The head of product asks you for an urgent diagnosis: over the last two months, the number of users who add at least one item to cart is flat, but the share of those users who go on to place an order has fallen sharply. Assume weekly add-to-cart users are steady, while cart-to-order conversion has dropped from about 40 percent to 30 percent. Leadership is worried because completed orders are down, especially in important cities, but finance also reminds the team that recent efforts to improve margins cannot be undone casually. Different teams have different theories. Some think checkout UX got worse, some suspect pricing or delivery fees, and others worry that competitors changed customer behavior. You need to tell the leadership team where you would look first, what data you need, which causes are most plausible, and how you would validate them before recommending any product or policy change.

What to produce

A 1 to 2 page diagnosis memo.

Your answer must

Define the core metric problem and show the funnel breakdown you would use to localize the drop from cart to placed order.
List the most important clarifying questions and data cuts you would request, covering scope, users, timeline, recent product or policy changes, competition, and business goals.
Provide a ranked list of 3 to 5 root cause hypotheses, and tie each one to specific signals you would expect to see in the data.
Recommend a validation plan with at least one fast analysis and one experiment, including primary metrics and guardrails.
End with your first next step for the team, with a short rationale and the main trade-off you are accepting.

Constraints

You have 48 hours for an initial readout to leadership.
You cannot assume fresh user research will be completed before that readout.
Any recommendation must respect the current goal of improving unit economics, so simply removing fees is not enough without evidence.
Engineering bandwidth next sprint is limited to small checkout changes or controlled experiments.

Format

Use short sections such as problem framing, data cuts, hypotheses, validation plan, and recommendation. A simple funnel table or bullet list is enough.

How Swiggy Instamart actually played it

A worked RCA where add-to-cart is stable but orders after cart fell 25 percent. It looks at the checkout steps, pricing, delivery and user segments.

Locate the exact funnel step that changed
Consider pricing, fees and delivery estimates at checkout
Validate the cause with data before building

Built from Root Cause Analysis: Instamart cart to order drop of 25% by Sreerag Panat.