Product Manager Mock Interview: Increase Restaurant Profits (with Google PM)

what advice would you give to a new restaurant looking to increase profit [Music] I have a few follow-up questions just to see if I understand the prompt correctly make sure I'm not making any assumptions the first one is restaurant is a rather broad term can we narrow down what kind of restaurant we're talking about is this a you know Quick Serve fast food type restaurant or small business mom and pop or maybe like a high-end fine dining type restaurant things are all great segments to focus on um which one do you do you think makes the most sense for us to focus on I think for now considering a post-covered world uh the most impacted businesses may be small businesses mom and pop restaurants and it might be very helpful for us to delve into areas where they can maximize their revenue and profit margins sure yeah it makes sense I think a lot of these small businesses were struggling during covid and they might continue to be struggling so I think this is an impactful area to focus on great sounds great um I think my next question was is the restaurant a franchised probably not considering we chose the mom and pop segment um the next one was I wanted to understand the current state of affairs of the restaurant so what is their current footfall uh are they actually booked out all the time or are they struggling to get people through the door yeah let's make the assumption that a lot of these small restaurants small mom-and-pop restaurants are getting competition from other restaurants because of the Advent of doordash and ubereats these kind of apps and so they've lost a lot of their sort of like meals served from before covid and before these apps became really popular so I guess the question is how can we help them both get new customers and also just help customers order more sounds good all right and I wanted to know maybe like since we're talking about profit and not just Revenue are there operations currently optimized or is there areas and cost centers that we can cut down on uh that's a great question as well um let's focus more on the revenue part and but I love that you're pointing out that there's possibly costs that we can consider to cutting down also sounds good um and then I'm guessing since we're in post covid and the business did take a hit during the pandemic the current state of finances and Affairs is probably a little bit Rocky and we're looking to you know boost our longevity as well as popularity at the restaurant as much as possible mm-hmm yeah that's fair okay and I think last question is how accessible is this restaurant and when I say accessibility I think there's multiple factors there one of them is literally how easy is it for people to get to the restaurant and other than that there's accessibility in terms of is a menu available online are they able to order is there a credit card processing available stuff like that yeah so I think these are great questions to consider um these are all like Mom and Pop restaurants so there's varying degrees as to how accessible each one is um but yeah feel free to make some assumptions as you think of some recommendations okay I think the the most pressing one over there would be how accessible is it physically right so let's assume that this restaurant is in a city and can be accessed easily and then we can sort of dive into more of improving the dining experience and we can also consider the case of improving maybe the takeout and online ordering experience as well yeah that's a fair assumption cool uh with all of this in mind I'm going to take a couple of minutes to jot down my initial thoughts and come back with some like basic structure cool sounds good okay so I want to very broadly look at this as the factors that influence profit for restaurants I'm not a restaurateur myself but I'm looking at this as a product I think there's two key areas that we can we can look at the first one would be the quantity and value of orders overall that boosts revenue and the other one would be cost of operations which is a cost center and reduces overall profit so when we look at the revenue side in quantity and value orders we want to look at maximizing the number of orders per day and we want to look at maximizing the average order value and when it comes to cost centers there's multiple places like raw material costs space and utilities employee costs and administrative and accounting overhead now the second cost center like we mentioned earlier in your steer from before is possibly something that we could deprioritize for now and focus on the revenue Factor really look into areas that we can improve the quality of a service as well as the number of people that are actually placing orders to the restaurant does that sound good sure yeah that sounds good awesome so I think what we need to do now is look into different factors that can influence both the quantity of orders per day as well as the average order value so if I'm putting down just like rough areas that we can look into for a number of orders per day what we want to do overall is increase footfall as well as orders placed correct so I think strategy is to increase football could be you know we could have marketing strategies Social Media stuff like that we could also look into improving the dining experience to make sure that users or customers come to the restaurant have a good time spread it through word of mouth and actually return to our restaurant we also might want to look into Turning Tables quicker and making sure we're optimizing the hours of operation making sure that we're able to serve as many customers during our open hours as possible and then into actually maximize the order throughput that isn't limited by our overall physical space we might want to consider partnering with delivery services catering services other parties and stuff like that um and I guess there's additional Revenue centers that we can look into like um creating lines of at-home kits to cook as well as you know franchising but I think that might be a little bit out of the scope of a mom and pop shop for now does that look does that sound good yeah well I think these are all great recommendations I'm curious um let's say that there's a mom and pop shop that's coming to you for this advice like what's the order in which you think they should start tackling these recommendations yeah so I think for a restaurant looking to increase adoption as well as engagement abusers meaning getting people through the door and giving them a good experience it's important to actually solve a real customer need so really understanding what the food preferences are people around the neighborhood understanding what food is in demand and being able to actually serve that need in a high quality way is like your number one priority so making food sure our food is good as well as making sure our food is something that people around us are interested in right once we have a good product to sell there's a whole lot of things around that that actually create a restaurant experience um so if we wanted to overall improve our dining experience there's a few different levers that we can tug on I think the first one is creating a really seamless customer experience right making sure that our restaurant is accessible online making sure that we have really good weight staff that takes care of people making sure that we are credit card accessible everything that sort of usually increases the friction of a customer or consumer Journey taking that out and providing a really good experience um I think the second one is like you know they're really staying true to the restaurant's identity making sure that the way we brand ourselves really embodies the kind of food we serve and the service we create because I feel like users are drawn more to something that seems authentic uh a restaurant that's trying to do some things very well as opposed to multiple things sort of poorly um a third one would be to provide a really personalized experience right this is something where we could invest in high quality or like very interested staff to make sure that we're able to provide customers with the greatest experience really treat them well provide personalized issues for them that really account for their dietary restrictions any other restrictions that they might have um I've got a couple more happy to pause to like take any questions or feedback until now yeah thanks I think those those like high level steps make sense um let's move on to some of those like other recommendations that you wanted to talk about yeah I think one more is something that can be done at a lower cost as well as improving the Ambiance of a place uh very often mom and pop Stores um don't really have the most captivating look about them and I think that there are some ways to increase the overall Ambiance like score so there's like a better atmosphere higher quality and better lighting introducing outdoor dining for example and then maybe even like something along the lines of music and entertainment to help people stay more engaged really have more than a dining experience when they come to eat at this restaurant are all options that you can offer for like relatively lower costs I think maybe not the music one that might be more expensive but yeah cool yeah I get it um I think these are this is all great advice for helping to get more customers into the door helping attract new customers so I think we we've kind of broke this problem into two parts like the first part is getting more customers to become aware of the restaurant coming to try the restaurant let's assume that we already have a like a base of supporting um like very like customers who were aware of the of the restaurant and want to come eat at a restaurant um with that assumption what sort of advice would you give the the restaurant if they want to just increase just purely the number of orders that they're serving yeah that's a great question and I think there's a few different strategies here we've got like in in restaurant dining as well as take out options right so let's talk first about the in restaurant dining really maximizing the number of orders that we can take there um I think here what are key metric to move would be turning tables we want to be able to turn the maximum number of tables to make sure that we're maximizing our overall open hour time right so what that could be is maybe introducing upper limits to reservation times where you're allowed to die in the restaurant for 60 minutes or 90 minutes just to make sure that it's time boxed and you're able to fit as many people in tables as possible quicker and more efficient service can actually go a long way making sure that there are less mistakes made in orders making sure that ordering is seamless possibly through like self-ordering devices through the phone tablets or even through like other POS systems um I think another easy one to pull on there is extended hours of service maybe including an additional hour in the morning in the evening to actually just maximize time of operation and then actually increasing the restaurant capacity this could be you know like I mentioned earlier introducing outdoor dining or reorganizing the dining area to maximize the space including you know booths uh Corner seating stuff like that that can really help you increase the number of tables at your restaurant and the other side of this that we were talking about is out of restaurant dining um a lot of mom and pop shops are now waking up to the uh Integrations with doordash toast um ubereats and stuff like that that's always a really great option for restaurants so being able to actually create a takeout workflow could be something that really boosts that throughput of orders I think what that could look like for a restaurant is you know to create that workflow would be to optimize the POS system a lot of in-restaurant systems may not be able to handle the takeout workflow order because there's addresses there's numbers contact information being able to address that then stocking delivery supplies making sure you have enough to actually package orders in a sanitary like high quality way creating a delivery space dedicated to take out orders as well as like ubereats and doordash areas and then considering like a third-party delivery service in addition to maybe your own delivery service where you have people from the restaurant Who deliver locally within a five mile radius or some sort um I think those are really like a lot of options to increase numbers if we did want to look further there's also you know catering options that we could look at where you cater larger parties with food minimums as well as maybe creating a line of at-home kits where you have like a bag of food that can be was pre-prepared take it home and like just complete the preparation so you can have a really nice at-home meal um I think this is a like very creative a wide breadth of ways that restaurants can make more money now that they already have a void very loyal or supportive customer base I think one of the hardest things for a cus for a restaurant to understand though here is figuring out when the right time it is for them to pursue some of these recommendations like when should they start expanding to outdoor dining when should they start expanding to new apps and I'd be curious um maybe just taking one of those recommendations that you had I'll let you pick one of them and share what kind of framework a restaurant should think about um or like yeah like what what a restaurant should look for that would help them understand that hey like right now is the right time for us to pursue this recommendation yeah absolutely I think maybe we can deep dive into the delivery service option because that seems to be something that's quite pervasive now and can be pretty tricky to decide if it's a good good idea for you because maybe it doesn't work for every restaurant right so when we're looking into delivery services I think the number one thing that we need to look at is is the food that we make optimal for delivery because sometimes there are some foods that are that don't carry well over large distances or don't package well and are really meant to be eaten at a restaurant like a good example is like I don't know ice cream or a taco or something like that although they do do a good job delivering tacos these days so really understanding your product and finding a way to package that in a manner that does not compromise the quality of your product right and the second thing is understanding when delivery makes sense is I think there's two different ways to look at this one of them is people are interested in the food but are unwilling to make the trip to come to the restaurant either because it's far away or because the Ambiance maybe doesn't suit their needs and the other one is you're at capacity and you still want to be able to fulfill orders and people are unable to sit at the restaurant so they are willing to take the food back home or somewhere else to eat it so these are the two areas where I would be like I would be able to decide if takeout is a good option now there's again a build or buy situation there of one is do we want to have your own take out do you want to have your own Fleet of delivery trucks or bicycles however that's done or if you want to engage with a doordash ubereats type situation the first one is if you have the capacity to do that within your staff within your general budget it might be a good idea because you can not have to really profit share with another delivery app but in the case that you don't and you're short staffed it might make sense to partner with one of these apps another good reason to partner with an app is you get more visibility right so your marketing only goes so far but something like a doordash or Uber use that reaches you know millions of active users per day might actually be able to cater your service a little better yeah and that might be a great way for you to get new customers who maybe they're searching for your kind of food your type of Cuisine come across your restaurant that's how they discover you um and I also loved how you mentioned that there's probably some foods on your menu that makes sense for for delivery and some that don't so maybe coming coming up with the subset of the menu That's purely for delivery purposes um I love it um nathura I think this is a great point for us to stop our mock interview I loved how you were able to give a wide breadth of recommendations and we were able to dive deep into some of your recommendations specifically on delivery so um one question before we wrap up the entire video is if you could redo the interview and if you could maybe find some areas that you would have done differently what might maybe like one or two of those things have been um yeah actually as I'm thinking about it I feel like I could have spoken a little bit more about a structure before I dove in so that you had a clear idea of where I was gonna go um I started off with like talking about the different types of ways we could improve it but if I had maybe talked about how we want to improve adoption or improve engagement up front that might have been a little bit of a clearer path um additionally I feel like maybe I offered too many options too quickly we could have walked through them a little bit slower gotten a little more feedback along the way to you know streamline the conversation a little yeah yeah I think um this is just good general advice like being able to give a structure um and but I think you you also did a really good job of pausing and giving me the opportunity to jump in and ask questions and I think it's also valid maybe one strategy in these sort of interviews is um letting the the interviewer know that hey I'm going to give you a lot of different options and then I'll let you choose which one you want me to dive deeper into but overall I think this was a really good mock interview I'd say this is like in 10 out of 10 answer and so it was great filming this with you nathura and for the audience watching at home good luck with your upcoming PM interview thanks so much for watching don't forget to hit the like And subscribe buttons below to let us know that this video is valuable for you and of course check out hundreds more videos just like this at try exponent.com thanks for watching and good luck on your upcoming interview [Music]

Channel: Exponent

Views: 33,257

Keywords: yt:cc=on

Id: pvl5IM5LlP0

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023