Design a better Drive experience for consumers at global scale

Problem Statement Description

Product context: DoorDash is a local commerce and delivery platform; its products include restaurant delivery, DashPass, grocery and retail delivery, merchant tools, and dasher tools.

DoorDash Drive enables merchants and businesses to use DoorDash’s logistics network to fulfill deliveries for orders that consumers may place outside the DoorDash marketplace, such as on a restaurant, grocery, retail, or brand-owned website or app. In this product design interview, you are being asked to design a better consumer-facing Drive experience at global scale.

Focus on the end consumer’s workflow: discovering delivery availability, placing an order through a merchant channel, understanding fees and timing, tracking delivery progress, handling changes or issues, receiving the order, and getting post-delivery support. Unlike a typical DoorDash marketplace order, the consumer may not know DoorDash is powering fulfillment, may not have a DoorDash account, and may interact across multiple merchant experiences with inconsistent expectations.

The design should account for DoorDash’s role as a logistics partner while balancing consumer trust, merchant ownership of the customer relationship, Dasher efficiency, delivery reliability, and marketplace economics. Consider how the experience should work across regions, merchant types, order categories, and delivery contexts without assuming a single app surface or one standardized merchant flow.

The experience should consider:

- Consumer pain points before, during, and after a Drive-powered delivery

- How consumers understand delivery timing, fees, handoff instructions, and service ownership

- Tracking, notifications, support, refunds, cancellations, substitutions, and failed deliveries

- Differences across restaurants, grocery, retail, pharmacy, and other local commerce use cases

- Global scale constraints such as language, payments, regulations, address formats, and delivery norms

- Merchant needs around brand control, conversion, customer loyalty, and operational simplicity

- Dasher experience implications, including pickup readiness, drop-off accuracy, and issue resolution

- Reliability, trust, and transparency without overcomplicating the checkout or delivery flow

Your goal is to frame the consumer problem clearly, identify the most important user segments and moments of friction, and define a product experience that improves Drive-powered deliveries while respecting DoorDash’s multi-sided marketplace constraints.