A food delivery platform's operations team is judged today on 'average delivery time', which has improved from 38 to 31 minutes over a year. In the same year, complaints about cold food and cancelled orders have risen, and rider attrition has nearly doubled.
Explain what is wrong with the current metric, propose the metrics the operations team should own instead, and name the guardrails.
100 points, 60% to pass.
An average hides the tail: customers remember the 70-minute order, not the mean. An average can also be improved by cancelling slow orders or pressuring riders — consistent with rising cancellations and attrition. Better primary metric: share of orders delivered within the promised time (on-time rate), or the 90th-percentile delivery time. Inputs: restaurant prep time accuracy, rider assignment time, travel time. Guardrails: cancellation rate (especially platform-initiated), food-quality complaints, rider attrition and earnings per hour, and safety incidents.