What API and data model would support a new Drive workflow for families

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 exploring a new Drive workflow for families, where a delivery may be created, paid for, tracked, or managed by one family member while the actual recipient may be another person in the household or extended family. Examples could include a parent sending groceries to a college student, an adult child arranging meals for an older parent, or a household coordinating recurring essentials across multiple addresses.

You are asked to think as a Technical PM for DoorDash Drive and define what API surface and underlying data model would be needed to support this workflow. The focus is not on designing the consumer UI, but on specifying the product and technical capabilities that would let DoorDash systems, merchants, or partners create and manage family-oriented deliveries reliably and safely.

Your scope should include how family relationships, delivery recipients, addresses, permissions, notifications, payment responsibility, and delivery status are represented. You should also consider the operational realities of Drive: merchant handoff, Dasher assignment, substitutions or delivery issues, proof of delivery, support workflows, privacy, and marketplace reliability.

The experience should consider:

- The core family delivery workflow, including who initiates the delivery, who receives it, and who can modify or cancel it.

- API requirements for creating, updating, tracking, and resolving issues for family-linked Drive deliveries.

- Data entities and relationships such as family account, member, recipient, payer, address, order, delivery, consent, and notification preferences.

- Privacy and security constraints when exposing recipient information, delivery location, payment details, and family membership.

- Reliability requirements for delivery status, real-time tracking, retries, idempotency, and failure handling.

- Integration needs for merchants, internal DoorDash systems, support agents, Dashers, and notification services.

- Observability, auditability, and metrics needed to detect broken workflows, permission errors, delivery failures, and support escalations.

- Product trade-offs between flexibility for families, operational simplicity, Dasher clarity, merchant integration effort, and unit economics.

The goal is to describe a clear technical product design that enables family-based Drive deliveries while protecting users, supporting reliable fulfillment, and fitting into DoorDash’s existing logistics marketplace constraints.