What API and data model would support a new Marketplace workflow for families 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 is exploring a new Marketplace workflow designed for families who coordinate ordering across multiple people, preferences, addresses, budgets, and schedules. The workflow may involve parents, partners, children, caregivers, or other household members making decisions together across restaurant, grocery, convenience, or retail use cases.

As a Technical PM, your task is to describe the API and data model needed to support this family-oriented Marketplace experience at global scale. The focus is not just the customer-facing flow, but the underlying platform capabilities required to handle shared accounts, permissions, carts, payments, recommendations, merchant availability, delivery coordination, and operational reliability across markets.

Assume this must work within DoorDash’s broader three-sided marketplace, where customer convenience, merchant ROI, Dasher earnings, delivery reliability, privacy, and unit economics all matter. The design should account for internationalization, compliance differences, high-traffic ordering periods, and the need to evolve the workflow without creating brittle one-off systems.

The experience should consider:

- Core user roles, permissions, and ownership models within a family or household

- Key entities and relationships in the data model, such as profiles, households, carts, orders, addresses, payments, preferences, and consent

- APIs needed to create, update, retrieve, and coordinate family Marketplace actions across mobile, web, and backend services

- Reliability, latency, idempotency, consistency, and failure handling for shared carts, checkout, order edits, and delivery updates

- Privacy, security, parental controls, payment authorization, and regional compliance requirements

- Integration points with merchant inventory, pricing, promotions, personalization, fraud, support, and logistics systems

- Observability, auditability, experimentation, and operational tooling needed to monitor and improve the workflow

- Product and technical trade-offs between flexibility, simplicity, scalability, and marketplace efficiency

The goal is to demonstrate how you would translate an ambiguous family-focused Marketplace concept into a scalable technical architecture and product platform, while making clear assumptions, defining system boundaries, and explaining how the design would support DoorDash’s global marketplace needs.