Zomato`s Order management System
2025
How might we drive self-serve growth through competitive insights?
Context
Restaurant partners wanted to grow but couldn't identify what to fix
Guidance existed scattered across dashboards, Key account manager (KAM) calls, and quarterly reviews. But when a partner's orders dropped 15%, they couldn't diagnose if it was their menu, their delivery speed, or just a new competitor three blocks away.
Product Designer and researcher
Led product design, competitive benchmarking strategy, peer selection logic, and cross-functional alignment with category leads and KAM teams to define what "fair comparison" means at scale
Team
Vaibhav Kumar
Product head
Guru Pramod
Product Manager
Gaurav Shukla
Engineer
Duration
December 2025 - March, 2025
IMPact
3x Increase in Insight to Action
Partners who viewed competitive positioning were 3x more likely to adjust pricing, refresh menus, or extend hours within 48 hours—without KAM intervention. Competitive clarity turned performance anxiety into concrete next steps.
30% reduction in support related queries
KAMs stopped spending 30+ minutes per week explaining basic performance trends. The system surfaced competitive displacement automatically
Design Solution
Competition Insights
Origin
Partners were competing blind
November 2024. A restaurant partner in Bangalore saw orders drop 15%. He called his KAM: "Is this me, or the market?" City-wide averages said "market is fine." But he wasn't competing against the city—he was competing against outlets in his 3km zone.
The data existed: delivery times, menu overlap, local competition. But it was fragmented. Without peer comparison, he couldn't diagnose if the problem was his menu, his delivery speed, or new competition. Generic recommendations like "run ads" felt like Zomato extracting money, not helping him compete.
My orders dropped. Is this something I did?
👨🏽💼
Restaurant owner
Biryani Blues, Gurgaon
Tell me one thing: what should I fix right now?”
👨🏽💼
Merchant Partner
La Pinoz , Delhi
We spend hours coaching merchants, but the guidance isn’t tied to real-time and representative of the…
👨🏽💼
Key account Exectutive
Delhi
I want clear recommendations & not numbers so I can act confidently and improve
👨🏽💼
Restaurant owner
Chicken Story, Gurgaon
When metrics drop, we scramble; when things are good, we don’t know if we could do better…
👨🏽💼
Outlet Manager
Dominoes, Delhi
My KAM said performance is fine but the graph shows a dip
👨🏽💼
Merchant Partner
Seeed sweets, Gurgaon
Product problems
No performance context
Partners didn't know what "good" meant for their cuisine, city, or scale. Without peer comparison, growth felt vague
Generic recommendations eroded trust
Existing guidance was shallow: "run ads" or "increase discounts." Partners saw this as Zomato extracting money, not helping them compete
Low confidence in decisions
Guidance scattered across dashboards and KAM chats. Actionable insights surfaced late, partners reacted instead of anticipated
No diagnostic framework
When performance dipped, partners had no way to diagnose issues or recover. Existing tools lacked a clear failure or recovery path
Problem statement
How might we drive self-serve growth through competitive insights?
This framing emerged from the four core problems. Partners needed clarity on where they stood (context), confidence in who they were competing against (transparent peers), and concrete actions to close gaps (actionable guidance).
The question wasn't "how do we give partners more data?" They already had data. It was "how do we transform performance metrics into competitive intelligence that drives action without KAM intervention?"
Product Goals
Transform fragmented performance data into competitive intelligence that drives self-serve actio
We focused on three interconnected outcomes that would reduce KAM dependency while building partner trust.
Surface actionable, early signals
that guide self-serve fixes before performance dips, improving daily decision-making and ROI ownership.
Give partners contextual clarity
with trustworthy benchmarks that reveal true market position and reduce dependency on support teams
Transparent, peer-based benchmarking
that fosters healthy competition and trust by openly explaining gaps against market leader
Contraints
Building competitive intelligence without triggering destructive behaviour
We had to balance transparency with privacy, speed with scope, and fairness with control—all within a tight validation window
No raw leaderboards
Public rankings would trigger price wars and menu manipulation. We needed constructive comparison, not destructive competition.
Anonymisation required
Partners see aggregated peer performance but can't identify specific competitors. Privacy and competitive fairness had to coexist.
Target segment
Bottom 75% of KAM portfolios: growth-stage (10-500 OPD, 42% order volume) and new partners (≤10 OPD, 4.5% order volume). Excluded major chains (>500 OPD) who compete against their own outlets.
12-week validation
180 partners across Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai to prove: does competitive positioning change behavior?
Design Highlights
Each highlight captures a key aspect of the Comp Insight product, showing which design goal it supports, the operational challenge it addresses for restaurant partners, and the design solution that makes insights actionable.
Give partners contextual clarity
Lead With Market Position
Signle Outlet view
Multi outlet view
Problem
Partners misjudge growth because they view their numbers without market context.
Solution
Ground the experience in relative performance so partners immediately see whether they’re truly ahead or behind, cutting through seasonal noise and triggering a more competitive, improvement-focused mindset.
Surface actionable, early signals
Turn growth strategy into guided, timely action
Problem
Existing recommendations are buried and important alerts are missing
Solution
Give clear, funnel-wide suggestions and timely alerts to flag underperformance and enable smarter decisions.
Transparent, peer-based benchmarking
Build trust through transparent benchmarking
Problem
City-wide averages feel too generic, and lack of control erodes confidence in insights.
Solution
Make the competitor set transparent and editable. Use filters like cuisine, AOV, and delivery zone to auto-select peers, while giving RPs the power to adjust this set as their business evolves.
Error Handling
Problem
When giving control user mind end up in a state with not enough competition
Solution
A unified, cross-outlet view mirrored how owners think letting them monitor and act across kitchens without switching screens.
Reflections
Transparency, timing, and recoverable gaps shaped behavior more than algorithmic precision
Editable peer sets built more trust than perfect algorithms
debated hiding peer selection to avoid gaming. But letting partners adjust filters created buy-in. 12% edited their cohort, and even with bad news, they trusted it because they controlled the comparison.
Competitive context made generic recommendations actionable
"Improve delivery speed" was ignored. "You're 18% slower than comparable outlets—optimize to 22 minutes" drove action. Partners needed to see the gap and the target, not just the metric. Competitive framing turned vague advice into concrete goals
Performance gaps needed to feel closable
Partners acted on 10-25% gaps. Wider gaps (40%+) created resignation. We calibrated benchmarks to show achievable deltas, not aspirational ones
