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 household may coordinate deliveries for multiple family members across different addresses, schedules, preferences, and permissions. Unlike a standard one-off Drive delivery, this workflow may involve a parent ordering groceries for a child, an adult coordinating meals for an elderly relative, or a family account managing recurring local deliveries through a merchant or partner experience.

As a Technical PM, define the API and underlying data model that would allow Drive partners and DoorDash internal systems to support this workflow reliably. The design should account for how family members are represented, how delivery requests are created and updated, how permissions and communication work, and how DoorDash can maintain operational quality across merchants, Dashers, recipients, and account owners.

Your scope is not to design the full consumer UI or choose the business strategy. Focus on the technical product requirements, system boundaries, data entities, API behavior, integrations, reliability expectations, privacy/security constraints, and trade-offs required to make this workflow usable at DoorDash scale.

The experience should consider:

- How family accounts, members, roles, addresses, delivery preferences, and consent should be represented in the data model

- What partner-facing or internal APIs are needed to create, modify, cancel, track, and resolve family-related Drive deliveries

- How authentication, authorization, and privacy should work when one person orders or manages deliveries for another

- How delivery instructions, contact preferences, substitutions, age-restricted items, and recipient availability should be handled

- How the workflow interacts with existing Drive concepts such as merchants, orders, quotes, fulfillment, Dashers, tracking, and support

- What events, webhooks, status transitions, and audit logs are needed for reliability and partner transparency

- How to handle failure cases such as wrong recipient, missing consent, address changes, failed handoff, cancellation, or support escalation

- What observability, rollout controls, backward compatibility, and data governance requirements are needed before launch

The goal is to describe a technically sound API and data model that enables a family-oriented Drive workflow while protecting users, preserving delivery reliability, supporting partner integration, and fitting within DoorDash’s marketplace and logistics constraints.