Design a product to improve the lunch experience in XYZ company.

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Design a product to improve the lunch experience in XYZ company.

Asked at Microsoft over a year ago

1.9k views

Product Design category

& 2 other companies

Asked at

& 2 other companies

1.9k views

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mohit diwan · Answer 1 · 2020-04-08T04:11:16+0000

Clarify the scope and restate the problem
- Our target company is someone who is providing lunch for employees or employees are getting their own lunch. (My assumption for this answer is the former)
- By mentioning the term "lunch experience", we aren't really limiting ourselves the food itself but the whole journey from start to end of having lunch.
- When we say "improve" do we have any signals of what's going wrong - is it wait times, food is not healthy etc.
Customers -
- Lunch eater - Different personas of eaters
  - Always busy eater - Employees who like having a meeting or working during their lunch very profound trend in US culture
  - Eat lunch like meal eater - Employees who put a lunch block on their calendars and want to eat in peace, be it for 5, 10 or 30 mins sometimes alone or with people
  - Follow the herd eater - Employees who don't really have strong preferences and just do what their team is usually doing
- Lunch caterer/providers - Usually companies such as sifted who have contracts with companies who provide food for their employees
- Company - Providing food for employees is kind of a norm in tech industry and not so much in others but this is a big enough segment to target.
Segment prioritization - At the end of the day the decision makers would be the companies, however their decision would be largely tied to employee satisfaction assuming this product is a nominal and comparable price with others in the industry. We would hence prioritize Lunch eater and cater this product to Lunch eaters with preferences (always busy, and eat lunch like meal). We might observe that some of the needs for this segment might be applicable for "follow the herd persona". Lastly, there needs to be an effort to acquire the right lunch caterer or provider however that can happen with field research and doesn't require extensive tech to get started.
Customer segment pain points - Prioritizing eater with preferences, primary pain points could be the following:
- Wait times - Employees usually eat around the same time hence it becomes a throughput issue because there are lot of people who want access to food at the same time. Same could be true for other segments as well.
- Meal choices - Employees would feel like having different preferences on a particular day i.e. they want to eat healthy, tasty, vegan etc but might not have the ability
- Food Taste & Quality - This is a real pain point especially if the quality of food being served is not upto the mark
Mission & Goal - Key pain point to resolve will be the wait times & queue, the rest of the 2 pain points could be resolved in the short term with upfront field research by choosing an appropriate food service provider. In terms of the mission, I want to create a product which provides a seamless and magical lunch experience for employees.
Solutions -
- Employee preferences - Few simple questions where every employee can provide general preferences such as Lunch only, Lunch + meetings, or don't care and typical lunch time. This would happen only once a month not everyday.
- Calendar integration - Integrating with company calendar to understand employees ability & preference about when they typically eat. We would provide them a dashboard view of employees eating at typical time slots between 11:30am - 1pm with 10 min slots.
- Smart recommendations - Focuses on one single metric, wait times at the lunch counter/pantry. We would also need some kind of hardward sensor to understand how many people are walking to the lunch counter. This could look like, currently wait times are higher, if you wait for another 5 mins then crowd will clear
- Lunch pick up option - Provide an option to quickly reserve a meal if you're busy running around and can just stop by to pick up food.
- Robot Food delivery
Key Metrics
- Goal would be focused on Adoption - % of employees in the company using the product especially because this is a 0 to 1
- Counter metrics would focus on retention - We need to really keep an eye on if we are reducing the amount of overall time and making it more efficient for employees to get lunch
Prioritization - Based on adoption goal and development effort, I would phase it out in the following manner
- MVP (Medium impact and low effort) - Employee preference and calendar integration
- Medium term (High impact and medium effort) - Smart recommendations and pick up options
- Long term - Deliver food at desk within the company using robots so we need to build a booking experience as well as invest heavily in getting robots to deliver food to desks
Summary - In order to provide an efficient and magical experience for employees, I would start with better understanding preferences and availability and quickly move to smarter ways of managing the throughput to reduce wait times. I would track adoption as my key metric and focus on retention to make sure employees are returning everyday to use the product.