Product design question
Design a dashboard for DoorDash’s CEO.
- DoorDash
- Product design
- Easy
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What this question tests
Tests executive-dashboard design thinking: can you identify the small set of metrics a CEO actually needs at a glance versus an operational dashboard with too much detail.
How to approach it
- Clarify the audience: a CEO needs a high-level, glanceable view of overall marketplace health, not granular operational detail better suited to a regional ops manager's dashboard.
- Identify the top-level sections: overall marketplace health (completed orders, GMV trend), three-sided supply health (active Dashers, restaurant partner count and churn), and financial health (net revenue, contribution margin).
- Prioritize trend over snapshot: each metric should show trend direction (week-over-week, quarter-over-quarter) since a CEO cares about trajectory and anomalies more than a single point-in-time number.
- Add an alerting layer: flag any metric moving outside a normal range (like a sudden Dasher acceptance-rate drop in a key market) so the CEO's attention is drawn to what needs decisions, not routine numbers.
- Keep the design minimal: 5 to 7 top-level metrics maximum with drill-down available but not shown by default, since dashboard clutter defeats the purpose for an executive audience.
- Define success as CEO engagement with the dashboard (regular usage) and, indirectly, whether it surfaces issues early enough to inform timely strategic decisions.
What a strong answer includes
- Explicitly scopes the metric count down (5 to 7) and justifies why, correctly reading that an executive dashboard needs restraint, not comprehensiveness.
- Structures metrics around the three-sided marketplace (customers, Dashers, restaurants) plus financial health, capturing DoorDash's actual business model in the dashboard design.
- Prioritizes trend and anomaly alerting over static snapshots, matching how executives actually use dashboards to catch problems early.
- Ties dashboard design to a decision-making purpose, not just information display, which is the real point of a CEO-level tool.
Common mistakes
- Designing an overly detailed operational dashboard with too many metrics, appropriate for a manager but not a CEO-level view.
- Ignoring the three-sided marketplace structure and showing only customer-side or revenue metrics.
- No trend or anomaly-alerting design, showing only static current-state numbers.
Likely follow-up questions
- Which single metric would you put front and center if the CEO could only see one number?
- How would you handle conflicting signals, like GMV up but restaurant churn also up?
- How would this dashboard differ from one built for a VP of Operations?
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More questions from DoorDash
Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop