Design a new feature in Merchant Portal that helps merchants achieve better outcomes

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 merchants use Merchant Portal to run and improve their business on the marketplace: managing menus or catalogs, monitoring orders, reviewing performance, handling promotions, understanding customer feedback, and making operational decisions that affect sales, reliability, and profitability. In this interview, you are asked to design a new feature within Merchant Portal that helps merchants achieve better outcomes.

Assume the target users may include restaurant owners, store managers, franchise operators, or merchant staff with limited time and varying levels of analytical sophistication. Their goals may include increasing order volume, improving margins, reducing cancellations, improving customer ratings, managing preparation accuracy, or understanding whether DoorDash is delivering sufficient ROI.

Your task is to identify a meaningful merchant pain point, define the user workflow around it, and design a product experience that fits naturally into Merchant Portal. The feature should create value for merchants while also respecting DoorDash marketplace dynamics, including customer experience, Dasher efficiency, delivery reliability, and business sustainability.

The experience should consider:

- Which merchant segment you are designing for and why that segment has a high-priority need

- The current merchant workflow, including where friction, confusion, missed opportunities, or operational burden may occur

- What “better outcomes” means in concrete terms, such as revenue, profitability, ratings, reliability, repeat orders, or time saved

- How the feature would surface insights, recommendations, actions, or controls without overwhelming busy merchants

- How merchants would discover, trust, and repeatedly use the feature inside Merchant Portal

- How the design accounts for different merchant sizes, categories, technical maturity, and operational constraints

- What marketplace trade-offs could arise across merchants, consumers, Dashers, and DoorDash

- How success could be evaluated after launch using merchant-facing and marketplace-facing signals

The goal is to propose a clear, user-centered feature concept for Merchant Portal, explain the merchant problem it solves, and describe the core product experience at a level that shows strong product judgment, practical workflow thinking, and awareness of DoorDash’s marketplace context.