Design a new feature in Merchant Portal that helps merchants achieve better outcomes 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 merchants use Merchant Portal to manage their business on the marketplace: menus or catalogs, hours, pricing, promotions, orders, operations, store performance, customer feedback, and financial outcomes. As DoorDash expands across restaurant, grocery, convenience, retail, and other local commerce categories, merchants vary widely in size, sophistication, geography, language, operational maturity, and business goals.

Your task is to design a new Merchant Portal feature that helps merchants achieve better outcomes at global scale. “Better outcomes” may include improved sales, profitability, operational reliability, customer experience, retention, or marketplace health, but you should define the target outcome clearly and explain why it matters for merchants and DoorDash.

Focus on the end-to-end merchant workflow: how a merchant identifies an opportunity or problem, decides what action to take, executes that action, tracks results, and learns what to do next. The feature should fit within Merchant Portal and account for the realities of a two-sided or three-sided marketplace involving merchants, consumers, and Dashers.

The experience should consider:

- The merchant segments you are designing for, such as small independent restaurants, enterprise chains, grocery operators, or multi-location businesses.

- Key merchant pain points in managing performance, operations, growth, profitability, or customer satisfaction through Merchant Portal.

- How the feature supports different countries, currencies, languages, cuisines/categories, regulations, and levels of merchant digital maturity.

- The specific workflow before, during, and after the merchant uses the feature.

- What data, insights, recommendations, controls, or feedback loops the merchant would need to make confident decisions.

- How the product avoids harming marketplace balance, delivery reliability, Dasher experience, consumer trust, or DoorDash unit economics.

- How success would be evaluated from both the merchant perspective and DoorDash perspective.

- Edge cases such as low-data merchants, multi-location operators, seasonal demand, menu/catalog complexity, and operational constraints during peak hours.

The goal is to define a focused, high-impact product experience for Merchant Portal, articulate the user problem and why it is worth solving globally, and describe how the feature would create measurable value without over-optimizing for one merchant type or one local market.