Revolutionizing Restaurant Search on Google Maps

As a PM for Google Maps, how would you improve the restaurant search?

Related to Product Improvement
For Technical PM

Google

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Answers (3)

Bobby Duncan

**Please note that I try to answer these questions as if I was in a real life interview. Thus they are usually short and condense (as oppose to a thorough exhaustive response). Interviewer responses will be in italic. I will also put my internal thinking process in [brackets].

Clarify

Great question! You’re asking me how I would improve restaurant search, correct? As in, I’m searching for a restaurant I want to eat at?

Yes that’s correct.

So before I jump in I want to think about this question and maybe ask you some clarification questions that might come up. Does that sound good?

Sure, let me know if you have any questions.

[Always ask clarifying question, no matter how simple the question might be. Remember the interviewer is more interested in your thought process than the actual answer you give. As a note, think about the different sides of the market/business. For example, the consumer side vs the business side]

When I think of restaurants search I can think of a couple thing

I’m in town, either somewhere new or where I live, and I’m either in my car or walking around and I’m searching for a place to eat (literally physically looking for a place to eat)
I’m on my mobile device or computer and I’m looking for a place to eat (mobile/web search).
I could be by myself, with a couple of friends, or maybe it’s a group of us (for a party or celebration)
Maybe I’m at home or work and want to order some delivery or takeout.

Also, as I was listing the above uses cases, It popped into my mind that maybe businesses or organization might want to find a place to eat:

I could be a business or organization that is looking for place to eat with my team of people (large organization, 20+)
- I could also be a business that is looking to a host an event at restaurant.
A business/organization that is looking to have lunch catered to my business
A business/organization that is looking to have lunch delivered (large order) to my business

So far, I’ve brought up restaurants search from the consumer/buyer point of view. What bout the restaurant side?

For example, if I’m a restaurants owner I might…

Want to figure out how good my search/reach is (SEO) with my restaurant and how to improve it.
- This could apply to my personal website listing or my listing on other websites (Yelp, trip advisor, etc…)
I want a better way to list and manage t my food, address, hours of operation, special, restrictions due to COVID. So when a potential consumer finds me all my information is up to date

My questions are:

Are we looking at solving the search problem for individuals or large business/organizations?
Do we want to include catering business or just dine in?
How about delivery?
Are we interested in the consumer side or the restaurant side?

Hmm. These are all very good questions! Given the current market, which problem do you think might be a good one to tackle?

Well, due to COVID, a lot of individual are working from home. Which means business are probably less likely to have employees working inside their offices.

So targeting business/organizations wouldn’t be beneficial. A LOT of people are ordering food delivery for a number of reasons: They are working from home, they are covid conscious and want to minimize going outside and being exposed, they want to save time by not leaving the house. From the restaurant stand-point, I don’t have a lot of personal experience so I’m not sure what exactly could be improved on.

So I think targeting search on the consumer side would probably be ideal.

I think that makes sense. So let’s focus on the consumer side.

So to clarify, we are going to focus on restaurant search from the consumer side of view.

That’s correct.

Great. So now that I have a better understanding on the problem we are going to solve, I want to give you a brief outline on how I’m going to tackle the problem.

First I’m going to list some potential users/personals. Next I’m going through the needs of one of the personas to narrow down the problem I’m solving I’ll then select one of the customer problems/needs to solve for. I’ll brainstorm some solutions and prioritize them. I’ll then figure out what’s the best solution to move forward with based on some attributes. Finally I’ll summarize my answer.

[Note that I am using the CIRCLES method to solve this design problem. So while I’m outlining my approach I’m not explicitly telling the interviewer each step within CIRCLES. You do not want to sound like a robot when you go through this process]

Does that work?

Sure, seems like a reasonable approach.

Great. Then next I’m going to list out some potential users/personals

Individual person working from home. During the work week he goes out or orders food for lunch.
Same individual as above but with diet/allegory restrictions.
Family of 4 or more.
Someone that loves to eat out but always wants to try something new.
Someone that loves to eat out but is looking to stick to what they like

So now that we have the above, I would like to prioritize them with the following attributes

MS: Market Size

MG: Market Gap – Perhaps these group of people are underserved in the current search market

I’ll use the 1,2,3 rating. A 1 signifying a lower market size/gap and 3 signifying a greater market size/gap.

	Individual	Allergies	Family	New Food	Same Food
Market Size	3	1	3	2	2
Market Gap	1	3	2	2	2
Total	4	4	5	4	4

So for this exercise I would like to focus on a family (4 or more) as the user personal.

Makes sense.

Next I want to identify some pain points for the person, to see where we can focus on improving search for this user.

I’ll do this by going through the user journey of searching for a restaurant for a family of 4 or more.

Family needs to decide if they will be cooking, dining out, ordering take out, or doing delivery.
Family needs to decide on what food it wants to eat. Japanese, Mexican, Italian, Indian, etc…
Once family makes s decision they need to look for a restaurant. They will search for a restaurant based on several factors
1. How far is the restaurant? Is there traffic going to and from the restaurant?
2. Does the restaurant offer delivery? If so from which service (Door Dash, Grub Hub, etc…)?
3. Does it offer dine in or takeout?
4. What kind of food does it serve?
Family finally selects a restaurant.
Family dines in, gets take out, or gets delivery from restaurant
Food is served/delivery and family dines.

So above I put the typical user journey for a family attempting to eat. Being that we are looking to improve search, I think it would be beneficial to target a pinpoint that the market has yet to fulfill. I think I want to focus on the 2nd point: “Family needs to decide on what food it wants to eat. Japanese, Mexican, Italian, Indian, etc…”. I’ve select this pain point for the following reasons:

If a family of 4 wants to eat, it would be worthwhile to make sure whatever restaurant they pick has food that they will all like.

I haven’t seen any innovate solutions to help people pick a restaurants based on the needs of 4 different individuals.

Now that we have a pinpoint we are solving for, I would like to come up with some solutions.

Search engine where you search by food dish instead of food type (Ex: Looking for a place that has hamburgers and tacos).
VR search engine where you can visually see a prepared dish
Search engine that you an search based on a food pallet

Now that we have 3 possible solution. I want to evaluate some trades offs to see what would be the best solution to implement. Again I will use the 1,2,3 scale.

Take make addition easier, a high level of effort for implementation is 1 and a low level of effort for implementation is 3

	Food Type	VR	Pallete
Level of effort	3	1	2
Innovate	1	3	3
Total	4	4	5

Thus, based on our criteria I would go with the pallet idea.

The way I would implement is as follows: The app would give each individual family a test as to what type of foods they like. Based on the results each of the family would be assign a “pallet” (Spicy food, savior food, etc…). This pallet can then be entered into the search engine and using all the pallets of every family member the search engine will give a set of results.

Interesting idea… can you summarize?

Sure, so in order to improve restaurant search. We decided to focus on families with 4 or more people. We then focused on helping them decide what type of food to eat. From there we came up with the idea of being able to help them develop a food pallet that we can use to search for restaurants. Based on each members food pallet, the restaurant search would return a result that covers all their family member’s food pallet.

**My own feedback**

I just started out practicing for interviews again, so I’m a bit rusty. Thus I welcome feedback on how to improve this answer.

Couple notes on this now that I’ve written it all down.

For the clarification portion, I think it would have been worthwhile if I explicitly also asked which platform we were targeting (web or mobile) and the technology.
In retrospective, I also forget to mention another key player in search: Advertisers.

Eva Richardson

Clarifying Qs/Goal:

What is it we are trying to improve in the restaurant search via Maps: Engagement, Acquisition, Adoption, Retention: Lets say Engagement
Any specific user groups targeted -No
Is it on any specific platform or geo-loc? – Lets say App in US market

User groups: Family with kids , Travelers looking for a quick bite, Those looking for takeout only during covid times

Focus on : Family with Kids –

User Journey

User launches the Restaurants search from Maps.
User can filter by location, type of restaurant, Cuisine, Delivery options, Reservations, Price etc
User will see the individual listings based on the proximity from user selected location.
These listings will have images, Ratings of that place, Duration of operation, Price range
User can Save this choice and Map directions to the place.
User can Reserve a Table

User Pain POints

In A family , each will prefer different meal options especially with kids – Need to have better Menu options
If the restaurant is in a City, it will be a challenge to Park and Pick up food and even to dine in
Sharing the Restaurant info with other family/Friends so they can all meetup there or pickup food from the same place
If in a group of family members, if there are any food / dietary restrictions, how can restaurants provide that info

Prioritized Paint points : #1, #2, #4, #3

Will choose 1, and 2 and 3 for MVP

Priority	Solution	Value/Impact	Effort/Cost
1	#1 – Currently I see Google Maps/Restaurants do not have a real time Menu choosing option. Its only a static image. We will need to have options like 1) kid friendly menu 3) Lunch/Dinner Menu 4) Drinks 5) Desserts .. that easily helps user to pick and choose.. Making ordering easy/fast	High	Medium
2	Solve the parking challenge by 1) Notifying if there is a drive through option 2) Any parking lots/parking spaces in the vicinity- surface those options.	High	High
4	Give more details around the Menu with an eye towards any dietary restriction family can have – Nut allergy, Vegan options, etc	Medium	Medium
3	Have a Share option within each Restaurant – to be able to share with other family members or friends.	Medium	Medium

Metrics:

%DAU, WAU, MAU who use Restaurant search from Maps and access the Menu

%DAU, WAU, MAU who use Restaurant search from Maps to Share it with others

%DAU, WAU MAU who look up Parking Spaces nearby the restaurant

%increase in order volume in a Week/Month at a restaurant when they are searched via Maps

# of reservations in a Week/Month via Maps for restaurants

Corey Amorin

Problem: Improve the restaurant search experience in Google Maps

Me(M): Why and What do you want to improve?

Interviewer (I): Improve engagement/retention. We have found that customers use other services to choose restaurants

M: Is there a reason why other services are being preferred?

I: We are sure, overall the experience seems to be better in other dedicated services

Framework that I will use: First, I will list potential customers, select a segment, list their pain points, select a few of those painpoints, present solutions that help engagement, prioritize them and the measure how the address the goal of engagement based on metrics.

It is to be noted that in this question, there is no issue of Awareness, Acquistion and Activation. This is because of the dominating market share of Google and the widespread knowledge of what Google maps does. Is that a reasonable assumption?

I: Yes.

M: Here are the two main customers and their pain points

Restaurants (i.e. their owners) – more the choices tailored to Google Maps better the retention

– Need to understand what the user is looking for

– Display items that pique the user’s interest (cost, waiting time, ratings, photos of food choices based on user signals)

– Best way to go to the top of the displayed list.

– Ability to offer specialized coupons to users

End users: People who want to go to a restaurant alone or in a group.

For the purpose of this interview I’m going to choose the end users as they drive the engagement/retention

Journey – find restaurant -> go to restaurant -> eat at restaurant -> pay – get back to home/office or destination

(1) Difficult to choose the restaurant, — many choices

(2) Coordinating with multiple people, — linking with calendars

(3) Communicating arrival time with restaurants so that they can plan service better.

(4) Total time of meal (travel + eating) – so that everyone’s schedules can be met.

(5) Optimize cost of entire meal. – deliver coupons/ indicate the approximate cost for the entire party

Based on the goals – engagement and retention, I will choose (1) and (3) . Within (3) I would like to focus on optimizing the that provides the best differentiation against other products and will drive people to use Google maps as their restaurant scheduler.

Solutions (Impact, Technical, time of implementation)

Pain point 1: Difficult to choose the restaurant

Use signals from the user and the restaurant owners to display an ordered list of 5 restaurants

Signals could include one or more of (Cost, distance, quality of food (reviews), type of cuisine, waiting time). Signals could be gathered using past history of usage or an user profile. (H, L, L)

If multiple users are involved, then a combination of signals from all the users could be used to decide the ordered list – (H, M, L) – This could also mean sending a message to the other users with a list of restaurants and their associated characteristics and gather information and then finalize the list and display to everyone.

Display restaurants that allow you to order remotely via an interface and keep food ready to go based on when you and your friends get there

Pain point 2: Arrival time communication with the restaurants

Based on current location of set of friends, and knowledge of their transportation status, Maps suggest the best way to get to the restaurant so that everyone arrives around the same time – (H, H, H).

This would potentially involve sending an Uber at the appropriate time.

Communicate the time of arrival of the entire party to the restaurant so that they can plan the service better.

Message can be sent to an email/SMS/Hangouts chat

Prioritization

Based on the list of solutions I would choose the “tailored” ordered list to the user as well as communicating the arrival status to the restaurants to the restaurants.

Metrics

Increase in the number of users using restaurant search (A/B test if needed)

Increase in the number of restaurants providing specialized services (coupons)

Increase in efficiency metrics using feedback from restaurant partners

Potential revenue from transportation partners.

Number of return users/week/month

Summary

Based on the goal requirement, I analyzed the different customer segments, chose the segment that will drive engagement and presented solutions that will be a differentiator for google maps as compared to the competition so that engagement/retention goals can be met.