Improve onboarding in Ads for restaurants

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 offers advertising products that help restaurants increase visibility and demand within a local delivery marketplace. In this question, you are asked to improve the onboarding experience for restaurants that are new to DoorDash Ads, especially merchants who may have limited time, uneven marketing knowledge, and a strong need to understand whether ads will drive profitable orders.

Focus on the restaurant-side workflow: how a merchant discovers Ads, decides whether to try it, sets up a campaign, understands budget and targeting, launches with confidence, and learns what to do next. Consider that restaurants vary widely by size, cuisine, location, order volume, margin structure, and operational capacity, so the onboarding experience must support both novice owners and more sophisticated multi-location operators.

Your scope is the product experience for onboarding into Ads, not a full redesign of DoorDash’s advertising business. You should identify key user pain points, prioritize the most important onboarding moments, and define what the experience needs to help merchants understand, configure, trust, and successfully activate.

The experience should consider:

- The primary restaurant users involved, such as owner-operators, store managers, franchise operators, or marketing teams

- How merchants become aware of Ads and what information they need before committing

- Friction in campaign setup, including budgeting, goals, targeting, creative setup, and expected outcomes

- Merchant concerns around ROI, order profitability, fees, cannibalization, and operational readiness

- How onboarding should adapt for different restaurant sizes, maturity levels, and advertising experience

- What education, guidance, defaults, or validation may be needed before launch

- How DoorDash should build trust while balancing merchant outcomes, customer experience, marketplace health, and delivery reliability

- How success of the onboarding experience could be evaluated without relying only on ad spend growth

The goal is to frame a clear product design approach for making Ads onboarding easier, more trustworthy, and more effective for restaurants, while preserving DoorDash’s broader marketplace quality and long-term merchant relationships.