Prioritize a quarterly roadmap for Ads

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 is planning the next quarterly roadmap for its Ads business within a local commerce marketplace that spans restaurants, grocery, convenience, and other delivery categories. The focus is on suburban users, where order density, merchant mix, delivery distances, and user intent can differ meaningfully from dense urban markets.

You are the PM responsible for turning a broad Ads mandate into an executable quarterly plan. The roadmap must balance advertiser outcomes, consumer experience, merchant fairness, Dasher implications, and marketplace unit economics while considering competitive pressure from other delivery, retail media, and local commerce platforms.

Your task is to describe how you would prioritize Ads initiatives for the quarter, including how you would evaluate candidate projects, sequence work, align stakeholders, manage launch risk, and define decision criteria for what makes it into the roadmap.

The experience should consider:

- The primary business and customer objectives for DoorDash Ads in suburban markets

- Key stakeholders, including consumers, merchants/advertisers, Dashers, sales, operations, data science, engineering, and finance

- How to compare initiatives across revenue impact, merchant ROI, consumer relevance, marketplace health, and operational feasibility

- Dependencies such as ad inventory, targeting, auction quality, measurement, sales enablement, experimentation, and merchant onboarding

- Sequencing across discovery, build, experimentation, launch, and post-launch optimization within one quarter

- Go/no-go criteria, guardrail metrics, and rollback plans for initiatives that may affect conversion, delivery reliability, or user trust

- Communication and alignment mechanisms for resolving trade-offs between Ads growth and core marketplace experience

The goal is to demonstrate how you would create a focused, realistic, and measurable quarterly execution plan for DoorDash Ads that can drive business impact without weakening the broader marketplace experience for suburban users.