DoorDash product sense: define and design a new health-focused experience
Company: DoorDash
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
DoorDash wants to offer something related to health in its app, and you are the product manager asked to design it. What would you build? Decide what "health" should mean for DoorDash, who it serves, which problems it solves first, and how you would measure whether it worked.
```hint Define health before designing
The word could mean medicine and drugstore essentials, prescriptions, healthier meals, or health services. Choose one meaning and justify it with DoorDash's strengths, such as fast local delivery from many kinds of stores, before you design anything.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Does "health" mean over-the-counter medicine and drugstore essentials, prescription delivery, healthier restaurant meals, or another idea, or is choosing the meaning part of the task?
- What is the business goal: new customers, more orders from existing customers, or growth in categories beyond restaurants?
- Are prescription drugs in scope, given the pharmacy regulation and privacy obligations that come with them?
- Is this a US launch first?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A justified choice among the meanings of "health" and a goal tied to DoorDash's business
- A segment defined by the need moment (for example, sick at home versus routine restocking) with concrete pain points
- Prioritized solutions that use DoorDash's merchant network and delivery speed, with impact and effort reasoning
- A north-star metric, leading indicators, and guardrails such as substitution errors and cannibalization of existing store orders
- Health-specific risks: regulated products, liability for anything that looks like medical advice, and privacy of health purchases
### Follow-up Questions
- A drugstore chain offers better terms if you route every health order to it. Do you accept?
- A customer's medicine is out of stock and the Dasher proposes a substitute. How should the product handle it?
- What would make you expand into prescription delivery, and what must be in place first?
Overview: A product design question about adding a health offering to DoorDash. It tests how a candidate defines an ambiguous term like health, picks a target user and need moment, prioritizes features that fit a local delivery platform, and handles metrics, regulation and privacy risks.