Define the North Star metric for Marketplace serving delivery partners

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Amazon is a commerce, logistics, media, devices, and cloud company; its products include Marketplace, Prime, Prime Video, Alexa devices, ads, fulfillment, and AWS.

Amazon Marketplace depends on delivery partners to reliably move customer orders from fulfillment and pickup points to customers. In this metrics interview, you are asked to define a North Star metric for the marketplace experience serving delivery partners, not just for customers or sellers.

Consider the delivery partner workflow: discovering available delivery opportunities, deciding whether to accept work, arriving for pickup, completing routes, handling exceptions, getting paid, and returning to the platform for future work. The metric should reflect whether the marketplace is creating sustained value for delivery partners while supporting Amazon’s broader promise of convenience, speed, and operational reliability.

Your task is to clarify what “success” means for this side of the marketplace, define the metric precisely, and explain how it would guide product and operational decisions. You should also address why the chosen metric is useful at a North Star level rather than only as a local performance or operational metric.

The experience should consider:

- The core delivery partner user journey and where value is created or lost

- The exact metric definition, including numerator, denominator, unit, and time window

- How to distinguish partner value from Amazon operational efficiency or customer delivery outcomes

- Relevant cohorts such as new vs. tenured partners, geography, delivery type, route density, and time of day

- Instrumentation needed across offer acceptance, pickup, delivery completion, exceptions, earnings, and retention

- Guardrail metrics for customer experience, partner fairness, safety, reliability, and cost

- How the metric would be used to make product, marketplace, and operations decisions

- Risks of gaming, misleading averages, or optimizing one side of the marketplace at the expense of another

The goal is to produce a clear, decision-useful North Star metric that captures the health of Amazon’s delivery partner marketplace and can help teams evaluate whether product changes are improving long-term partner engagement and marketplace reliability.