yelp
project
Challenge:
For my Product Management Class at General Assembly, the assignment was to develop a product idea. I keep a regular Bug List (a list of things that bug you, used for product inspiration) and one of the things on my list is that I always forget how I felt about a particular dish when I go back to a restaurant I’ve been to before. So I decided to focus on a product feature for the Yelp app.
Process:
After initial research I discovered that with an average of 28 million monthly app users, 74 million monthly web users, and 83 million monthly desktop users, and with restaurants being 2nd highest reviewed businesses behind shopping, only 9% of users actually wrote reviews. Based on this information, my problem statement therefore asked how Yelp might find a way to become a better resource for restaurant experiences while also engaging more users to leave reviews or ratings.
I conducted open-ended interviews on restaurant reviews and after thoroughly reviewing the data, my hypothesis was as follows:
By adding a feature to rate individual dishes in the Full Menu section of the app, we can increase opportunities for users to engage in the review process and thereby also using that data to allow for the ability to search individual dishes by ratings.
After analyzing the data, I developed a product idea that allowed for rating individual dishes on the full menus Yelp restaurant listings. Each item would also be able to have sticky notes to comment about individual dishes so that reviews for food could be separated from reviews about service. Using the data from ratings, searching for items by rating would be possible as well as adding a slider on the Yelp Restaurant Home page for featured highly rated dishes.
After conducting a competitive analysis and a SWOT analysis, I realized that due to the acquisition of restaurant delivery services that already had menu data, the data could easily and quickly be implemented into Yelp, a clear advantage amongst competitors.
I created a roadmap and KPIs indicating that by adding the ability to search for the highest rated menu item in a particular area, expectations are that Yelp would become the first restaurant resource for cravings and monthly active users would increase well above the current rate of 0.5% per quarter.