Sign in to save Manager, Merchant Services Strategy & Operations at DoorDash. They can name all the rock star Dashers and bestselling merchants. We are former journalists, founders, developers, and, yes, job seekers, working to improve the hiring experience from both sides of the table. Our competition spends aggressively in some markets, and while were well-funded, we cant just throw money at a problem and hope it goes away. DoorDash has built an incredible analytics machine that allows granular optimization experiments on the tiniest little things across the food delivery lifecycle. We try to make it feel like everyones working in the same place, rather than across the continent. Thanks. The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Act like an owner is a core value at DoorDash, and we definitely live that. signed a deal with a national retailer, BevMo. Ive heard this repeated often: Speak as if youre right. This role has the remit of shaping our Drive restaurants . If you want to stay in operations, you can move into leadership either on your team or for another side of the business. Strategy and Ops sets the pace for the rest of the company, so we have to anticipate what our merchants, customers, and Dashers will need on any given day and work toward their long-term goals. I think there are three distinct factors that make up for DoorDashs success: Its the 3rd factor that I think gets too little attribution data. From a previous research project, we knew that people are usually cautious about subscriptions and feel reluctant to commit. About. Through office hours, a member of the research team worked with the S&O partner to set up an easy way to recruit and schedule time with customers, and reviewed the interview scripts to make sure no biased/leading questions were being asked. How big is the problem? The S&O teams process can roughly fit into this model. We've continued to set new records in orders across our platform and order value on our Marketplace, as order rates among new and existing customers continue to exceed pre-Covid averages. Continued growth is key, because it means youve set your team up for success and theyll be equipped to scale up all three sides. Hey everyone. Each city presents its own opportunities and challenges, but we generally start by going door to door, talking to merchants. There might be one operations person who stays longer, to manage the transition to the full-time team. The combination of regional experts and focus on each side of the business ensures that local marketplaces within the regions are growing and running smoothly. I love the excitement of a launch and the chance to have my hands on so many aspects of what makes our business run.. From the S-1: higher GOV on a per order basis, as families spend more with more mouths to feed. How efficient is a given Dasher, and are we paying them accordingly? There are many other occasions where collaboration can happen. What is the biggest gap between customer needs and our current offering? If there was a big initiative to grow order counts for tomorrow, what would you do to make it happen. Its a lot of fast-paced decision-making and immediate results, which I love. Its not something you generally see at bigger, established firms that are more set in their ways. If this were a play, I would say we just finished act one this year. Sign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inbox. We usually stay in a city for six to eight weeks; the idea is to lay down the strongest possible foundation before we flip the on switch, then hand the market off to the team who will run it long-term. We celebrate each others successes and learn from each others challenges.. At my previous company intermix.io, we pretty much had every delivery company under the sun as a customer at some point. Within this process, there are typically four scenarios where S&O and research can partner: This is where researchers need to be proactive and try to be involved early, as it might not occur to S&O that they can leverage research resources at this phase. Usually, youll have to try at least a few before you find the right one, and each attempt gets you closer. For example, when the S&O team managing DashPass, DoorDashs subscription service, identified opportunities to offer additional benefits to subscribers, they modeled what the benefit structure should look like and ran operational tests (a quick way to test an idea that doesnt require meaningful engineering work). DoorDashs Strategy and Operations team can fairly be described as the companys lifeblood: they continuously push out new features and processes to users, then carry valuable on-the-ground insights back to headquarters. HBO, Go to company page Users can get the subscription for $9.99/month, and it is applicable to any restaurant that's DoorDash affiliated. When these goals were introduced over a year ago, I had trouble hitting these goals on a day-to-day basis. Building on that momentum, the two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company is getting into alcohol delivery not to mention its wealth of international expansion plans. We try to influence before a solution is set in stone, so that we are not just validating it. One day that might be recruiting new talent; the next its growth strategy; the day after that its working with top Dashers or merchants, making sure they feel valued. If you are strong in decision-making, leadership and . Are people ordering in more than they were pre-pandemic? Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes. These are just a few examples, and I focused on the ones that dont go too much into the weeds of technology and algorithms. DoorDash uses machine learning (ML) to analyze thousands of merchant menus, and has seen hefty improvement in menu performance from experiments involving header photos and more information about the restaurant. CNBC: Having led the development of DoorDash's logistics network across the U.S., can you talk more about that process, and how you think about scaling that logistics network in new markets? I can provide detailed insights. The focused, detail-driven judgement we relied upon to succeed then has become part of DoorDash's DNA, while also setting us up to better overcome the challenges that happened afterward (and have yet to come). Meet members of DoorDash's Strategy and Operations team. I was promoted to Associate General Manager, then General Manager for Los Angeles, and transitioned to my current role when we began building our specialized teams. Then, Contribution Margin went from deep red in Q1 2019 (-71%) into the black in Q1 2020 and is now in the 24% range at the the end of Q3 2020. Ive learned to push back a little bit. You might be sitting at the computer crafting growth strategy when youre called to do a delivery yourself. or generally what the interview rounds look like? We already learned how 85% of GOV is coming from existing customers, and thats because of high spend retention. Lets assume 8% for simpler math. At the heart of those plans is co-founder and CTO Andy Fang, whois responsible for the overall product vision, technology roadmap and architectural direction of the DoorDash consumer and international platforms. All DoorDash needs to do is acquire a customer and keep them on the platform beyond year 1. This is the gist of how pricing on DoorDash works. Worked in Tokyo, Singapore, Seattle, Taipei, Shanghai. Working on this team, Ive learned to embrace change; it happens quickly here because we have to be responsive to the marketplace. Everyone here is on the same team. For our full list of Doordash QAs, visit: https://www.mockquestions.com/company/Doordash/YT/************************************************************************************************0:00 - Introduction0:30 - Question #1: What would providing excellent customer service mean to you in this role with Doordash?1:32 - Question #2: At Doordash, we value organization. About The TeamOn the Merchant Strategy & Operations team, our mission is to have best-in classSee this and similar jobs on LinkedIn. The average order value has fluctuated within a narrow band, between $29.90 and $31.20. All with excellent data engineering teams. Theres also a subscription component to the DoorDash business, its not just purely transactional. If day one is disappointing, the question becomes: How well can you problem-solve? Any industry has a key transaction that measures the exchange of value. Your platform becomes intelligent. I worked at a startup after graduation, advising movie and music studios on how to maximize their potential at YouTube. acquire more merchants, and empower them with more merchant services that help them grow their business. TELUS WBcX53. What type of questions to expect in the SQL and case interview rounds? Because of their high density, you have more restaurant choice, shorter distance to the consumer, and a higher number of single young professionals with a high amount of disposable income that they prefer to spend on ordering dinner, not cooking it. As we continue to grow, we think about how we can maintain flexibility and meaningful earnings opportunities for Dashers, continue to have as much coverage for merchants as possible, and always ensure that consumers are receiving their orders efficiently. Ultimately, we are building a global logistics company thats what I came here to do. Its essential that we check in with each other along the way, to make sure we dont pour money and time into a product that we wont be able to use in the field. Other initiatives include co-marketing deals with e.g the NBA. View: 3842. That creates an ever increasing granular understanding of the business. Same story for Contribution Profit. When the flywheel kicks in, it creates economic uplift for all marketplace participants. We address this by emphasizing communication and collaboration, and we err on the side of over-communicating to make sure were getting the right information to the right people. I am confident that these skills will transfer well to the Doordash team.\"3) How do you define success in your work?Answer Example:\"I define success by my ability to reach the goals that are set for me. doordash strategy and operations manager interview. Im a Senior Strategy and Ops Manager for the Southwest region on the Dasher side of the business. When I wake up every day, my first consideration is how to get the highest ROI for my time; Im careful about prioritizing where to focus my attention. On a work level, this includes the targets that are set for me and the professional development that I seek. Its a bit difficult to define what I do, because it changes every week but thats how I like it. Thats not to say promotions are automatic, but you can definitely be confident that your work will be recognized and rewarded. Our point of sale program makes it easy to take detailed notes on customer preferences so I can provide tailored service to them. Doordash interviews can vary in difficulty depending on the position you are applying for. Answer Question We also work with Business Operations to look at the bigger-picture data beyond our own team, and with Engineering to help them improve the product. + Read More. In a diverse environment, it is great to learn from the perspectives of others, and this becomes especially important in problem-solving situations. If youre building your own company and are just about to go raise money, in particular for the first time Id love to talk to to you! Turns out DoorDashs Ideal Customer Profile wasnt just the Millennial Young Professional in the City, but also the All-American Family in Suburbia where both parents are working and dont have much time (or desire) to cook. Click the link below to head over to Substack and subscribe!, Investor at Rodeo Beach, co-founded and sold intermix.io, VP of Platform Products at Instana, https://doordash.engineering/2020/02/28/next-generation-optimization-for-dasher-dispatch-at-doordash/, https://doordash.engineering/2020/09/25/how-doordash-is-scaling-its-data-platform/, https://blog.doordash.com/celebrating-caviars-expansion-to-three-new-markets-austin-miami-and-san-diego-998c8cc6beea, how to optimize their dishes for delivery and pick-up, https://get.doordash.com/blog/off-premise-food-quality, https://blog.doordash.com/announcing-doordash-as-the-official-on-demand-delivery-platform-of-the-nba-wnba-and-nba-2k-league-a5d89616dfc0, https://doordash.engineering/2019/02/20/experiment-rigor-for-switchback-experiment-analysis/, https://doordash.engineering/2018/02/13/switchback-tests-and-randomized-experimentation-under-network-effects-at-doordash/, https://doordash.engineering/2020/11/10/uncovering-online-delivery-menu-best-practices-with-machine-learning/, a real-time prediction service called Sybil, https://doordash.engineering/2020/06/29/doordashs-new-prediction-service/, DoorDash also migrated from a Monolith to a Microservice Architecture, A relentless focus on execution 1% better every day, A data platform that drives intelligence and automation. The image below shows that the economics of a single order can look like. Because we were less well-funded than our peers, we had to be very disciplined about how we allocated capital while still trying to grow as a business. It makes people order more. Theres a lot of flexibility as far as how quickly you transition and where you go next. But more so DashPass takes friction of the ordering process, as theres no additional delivery fee. In food delivery that could be how many orders did we sell yesterday? or which is the the most popular restaurant in Austin in July vs. December?, Over time, analytics teams collect more data points, incl. Weve made an effort to increase diversity at DoorDash, and were seeing the results. Some stay as Strategy and Ops Managers, others move to different teams like Business Operations, Business Development, and Sales Strategy. We have a solid playbook of best practices. Thats what this post is about, and theres a tiny section on page 194 of the prospectus that touches on it: We have assembled a team of 617 highly skilled engineers, designers, and computer scientists whose expertise spans a broad range of technical areas, as of September 30, 2020. To provide the point of view from the S&O side, I asked Cat Beley, a Director of S&O at DoorDash, to share her thoughts on the collaborative partnership between them and the research team: Research is my first stop whenever my team is considering a new program or product. + View 9 more replies. I just interviewed a received an offer for DD strategy & ops.turned it down for something else but happy to answer questions! Shaving off minutes compounds across the whole fleet, raising income for Dashers and making DoorDash more efficient and profitable. In other words, the 2018 cohort has higher spend after Year 1 than the 2016 cohort after Year 4. When we encounter a bug in the site, for example, I can think of a couple engineers who will respond at 11 p.m. on a Friday night if I need them. They can also help fill the sales role in a newer region that doesnt yet have its own team. It can be tough to find people with a willingness to go above and beyond, but who are also humble and generous. A few examples. Consultant, Go to company page As I researched Doordash before applying to this role, I was so happy to see the focus that your organization puts on an inclusive environment for all.\"************************************************************************************************PRACTICE FROM OUR MOST POPULAR INTERVIEW VIDEOS:30 Behavioral Interview Questions: https://youtu.be/bXSnNwNWK0I5 Situational Interview Questions: https://youtu.be/vT2Q6hoxoAs5 Conflict Interview Questions: https://youtu.be/xoVB_QauBuoTeamwork interview questions: https://youtu.be/giSURWwwQbE************************************************************************************************ Manager for the Southwest region on the position you doordash strategy and operations interview applying for in other words, the question becomes how. The position you are applying for work level, this includes the targets that are set for me the! Something you generally see at bigger, established firms that are more set in,! 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