Diagnose a 20 percent drop in activation for Marketplace

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 Marketplace has seen a 20% drop in consumer activation. In this context, activation should be treated as the point at which a new or returning consumer completes the intended early marketplace action, such as placing a first order after signup, app install, or reactivation entry point. Your task is to diagnose what may have caused the decline and how you would structure the investigation.

The Marketplace experience spans discovery, restaurant or store selection, cart building, checkout, payment, fulfillment expectations, and order confirmation. A drop in activation could come from product changes, demand quality, supply availability, pricing, promotions, delivery reliability, onboarding friction, acquisition mix, or measurement issues. The investigation should account for DoorDash’s multi-sided marketplace dynamics across consumers, merchants, and Dashers.

This is an RCA interview question. Focus on how you would frame the anomaly, validate the data, segment the decline, generate hypotheses, evaluate evidence, and decide what immediate mitigations or follow-up work would be needed.

The experience should consider:

- How activation is defined, including numerator, denominator, time window, and eligible consumer population.

- Whether the 20% decline is real or caused by instrumentation, tracking, attribution, app release, or data pipeline issues.

- Segmentation by geography, acquisition channel, device/app version, new vs. returning consumers, merchant category, time of day, and cohort.

- Funnel breakdown across signup, location permission, browsing, store selection, cart creation, checkout, payment, and order placement.

- Marketplace supply factors such as merchant availability, delivery fees, ETA, Dasher availability, out-of-stock items, or canceled stores.

- Demand-side factors such as promotions, pricing changes, competitor activity, seasonality, or changes in traffic quality.

- Evidence needed to prioritize hypotheses and distinguish correlation from likely cause.

- Short-term mitigation, customer impact communication, and longer-term prevention or monitoring.

The goal is to demonstrate a clear, structured diagnostic approach that can quickly narrow the problem, identify the most likely drivers, protect the consumer experience, and help the Marketplace team decide what to fix, monitor, or escalate next.