Product design question
Design an app for reducing waiting time in restaurants or food chains.
- Swiggy
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design for a physical, operational problem: can you find where wait time actually comes from and design for both diners and restaurant staff.
How to approach it
- Ask what type of restaurant, assume casual dine in chains with walk in traffic, since fine dining and fast food differ.
- Break down wait time into stages: line to be seated, time to order, time food takes, and time to pay and leave.
- Identify the biggest lever, likely seating and payment, since kitchen speed is harder for a PM tool to fix directly.
- Design a feature: virtual queue with wait estimates and a pay at table option to free tables faster.
- Consider the restaurant side, since staff need to trust the wait estimate or they will ignore the tool.
- Define success as average table turnover time and reduction in walk aways due to long lines.
What a strong answer includes
- Separates the diner facing fix (join queue from phone) from the operational fix (faster table turnover via pay at table).
- States an assumption clearly, for example average current wait is 20 minutes at peak, target 12.
- Addresses restaurant incentive, since adoption fails if staff see it as more work.
Common mistakes
- Designing only a queue app without addressing table turnover, which is the bigger lever.
- Ignoring that restaurants, not diners, must adopt the tool for it to work.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you get restaurants to actually use this during a busy dinner rush?
- What would you measure in a pilot before wider rollout?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop