Project Context
At DoorDash, you are the analytics lead supporting three product areas: Growth, Merchant, and Operations. Over the next 6 weeks, multiple teams are requesting urgent insights at the same time, but your analytics pod has only 4 people: 2 product analysts, 1 analytics engineer, and you. Leadership expects faster decision support because two major launches are scheduled this quarter.
The requests are not equal. Growth wants a pricing analysis before a paid acquisition campaign starts, Merchant wants churn insights to support QBRs with top restaurant partners, and Operations needs delivery delay diagnostics before a city expansion launch. Each team claims its work is business-critical and wants top priority.
Key Stakeholders
- VP of Growth wants a recommendation in 10 days to unlock a $1.2M campaign budget.
- Head of Merchant Success needs partner churn insights before QBRs with 25 enterprise merchants in 3 weeks.
- GM of Operations needs root-cause analysis on late deliveries before launching in 2 new cities in 4 weeks.
- Director of Data expects transparent prioritization, realistic commitments, and no degradation in dashboard reliability.
Constraints
- Timeline: 6 weeks
- Team capacity: 4 people, equivalent to 18 analyst-days per week after recurring support
- Budget: No additional headcount or contractors
- Existing commitments: 30% of analytics engineer time is reserved for data pipeline maintenance
- Dependency: Growth pricing analysis depends on a finance-approved margin dataset arriving by Day 5
Complications
- A Sev-2 dashboard data quality issue affecting executive reporting may consume up to 4 analyst-days in Week 1.
- The VP of Growth has already told the CMO that pricing recommendations will be ready by next Friday, without confirming capacity.
- Merchant data for churn analysis has inconsistent account ownership fields, requiring manual validation.
Deliverables
- Create a prioritization framework for the analytics queue across the 3 teams.
- Propose a 6-week execution plan with sequencing, owners, and trade-offs.
- Define how you would communicate scope, timelines, and deprioritized work to stakeholders.
- Identify the top risks to delivery and your mitigation plan.
- Specify the success metrics you would use to judge whether your prioritization approach worked.
