Prioritize a quarterly roadmap for Ads 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 Ads is planning its next quarterly roadmap across a global local-commerce marketplace spanning restaurants, grocery, convenience, and retail. The business needs to grow advertising revenue while preserving customer trust, merchant ROI, Dasher earnings, delivery reliability, and overall marketplace health.

You are asked to prioritize what the Ads team should execute in the quarter, with special attention to suburban users and competitive pressure from large retail, delivery, and marketplace players. The roadmap may include advertiser-facing tools, consumer ad experiences, ranking/targeting improvements, measurement capabilities, marketplace quality controls, international or category expansion, and operational improvements.

This is an execution-focused question: your task is not to design a single feature, but to define how you would choose, sequence, and operationalize a quarterly Ads roadmap at scale. Assume multiple stakeholders are involved, including ads product, engineering, data science, sales, merchant success, trust and safety, finance, legal, regional market teams, and marketplace operations.

The experience should consider:

- How to define the quarterly objective and success criteria for DoorDash Ads without harming marketplace balance.

- Which customer, merchant, advertiser, Dasher, and regional segments matter most, including suburban demand patterns.

- How to compare roadmap options across revenue impact, user experience, merchant ROI, technical effort, operational complexity, and strategic urgency.

- Dependencies across ranking systems, attribution, billing, campaign management, experimentation, sales enablement, and regional compliance.

- Sequencing decisions, including what must ship first, what can be parallelized, and what should be deferred.

- Go/no-go criteria, launch readiness, experiment design, monitoring, and rollback plans for ads changes that affect live marketplace traffic.

- Communication and ownership across product, engineering, sales, analytics, operations, legal, and international teams.

- Key launch risks such as ad load degradation, poor targeting, advertiser churn, merchant dissatisfaction, measurement gaps, or negative effects on conversion and delivery reliability.

Your goal is to present a clear quarterly prioritization approach and operating plan that shows how DoorDash can scale Ads responsibly, make trade-offs under constraints, and deliver measurable business impact while protecting the core marketplace experience.