Product design question
Imagine that there is a supply chain problem across the globe. DoorDash has just launched its grocery service, but it has been receiving a lot of complaints about missing items. Currently, there are no substitutions available in the app. How would you solve this problem in the product? Chat is available between the shopper and the buyer.
- Meta
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Product design under real operational constraints: solving a supply-chain problem within an existing chat-enabled app flow.
How to approach it
- Clarify the scope: grocery delivery specifically, with missing items due to supply chain issues, and chat already available.
- Identify the core gap: no substitution flow, forcing shoppers to either skip items or guess what the buyer wants.
- Design the flow: shopper flags an item as unavailable, suggests a substitute via chat with a photo, and buyer approves or declines in real time.
- Address edge cases, like no response from the buyer within a time window, requiring a default fallback rule.
- Define success as reduced missing-item complaints and increased order completion satisfaction.
What a strong answer includes
- Uses the existing chat feature as the core mechanism rather than proposing a whole new system.
- Addresses the real edge case of buyer non-response with a clear fallback, like defaulting to refund the item.
- Proposes a concrete UI detail, like a photo-based substitute suggestion to build buyer confidence.
- Uses an assumed metric, e.g. reducing missing-item complaints by 25 percent.
Common mistakes
- Proposing a new communication channel instead of using the chat feature already available.
- Ignoring the case where the buyer doesn't respond in time.
- Not defining a metric to know whether complaints actually decreased.
Likely follow-up questions
- What happens if the buyer doesn't respond to the substitution suggestion in time?
- How would you measure whether this feature reduced complaints?
- How would you handle a shopper suggesting a bad substitute repeatedly?
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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