Customer-focused innovation at DoorDash

Cindy Gao ’23 MBA, MS has always seen eating food as a deeply personal and emotional experience. Born in China, Cindy grew up sitting at her round dining table with her family every night, debriefing the day or debating current events. She saw how food had the power to bring people together. Now, she taps into that power as a member of the strategy and operations team at DoorDash for Business, shaping meal experiences for millions of customers.

Founded in 2013, DoorDash is a leader in food delivery services. DoorDash for Business debuted in 2020 as a platform to help companies organize employee meal programs and corporate meal opportunities.

“DoorDash for Business is so young, compared to the rest of DoorDash,” said Gao, who joined the company in 2024. “So it’s even more important that we understand our customers’ needs deeply. The goal is to shorten feedback loops as much as possible, to rapidly test and iterate on solutions for customers at industry-leading scale.”

To do that, Cindy taps into the tools she developed during her time in Northwestern’s MMM Program: MBA + MS Design Innovation — a dual-degree designed for cross-functional leaders who build at the nexus of business strategy, human-centered design and technology application.

“Coming from big companies, I was used to starting every problem with data analysis,” Gao said. “The MMM Program taught me that while data is critical, it mostly reflects the current state, whereas a more open-ended, design thinking process can unlock solutions that are far more desirable. Now, the work to understand the customer isn’t complete until we’ve conducted user interviews, surveys, watched our users interact with the product live, or even performed site visits to understand their use cases.”

Looking beyond logistics 

The inspiration she took from MMM isn’t just limited to research skills, but also how to diagnose customer needs. During her Research-Design-Build class, Gao and her classmates collaborated with airline executives to improve the flying experience post-COVID. It would have been easy to think the challenge was a logistical one, but using design thinking principles, she realized there was a far more important emotional component that needed to be addressed.

She finds herself routinely returning to that same lesson in her role at DoorDash. DoorDash for Business offers a variety of business solutions for clients, from ordering employee meals and streamlining corporate meal planning to providing expensed meal credits and vouchers.

“When we build meal solutions for companies, we’re not only solving ‘how do we get food there on time and on budget?‘ We’re also thinking about the emotional reality of the people using our tools, like executive assistants who feel a lot of stress about feeding large groups and dealing with the fallout if something goes wrong,” Gao said. “A big part of the job is designing products that don’t just deliver meals but also provide peace of mind along the way.”

Recently, Gao’s key focus has been on DashPass, a program where companies can support employees with perks like lower fees and better support quality. She's worked to improve how employees enroll in the program and start using their benefits, and also has focused on leveraging partnerships to make DashPass more valuable for business users. For example, Cindy recently launched a partnership with corporate credit card company Brex, to get DashPass benefits into the hands of more business users.   

Designing for human needs

Gao credits the MMM Program with helping her develop the mindset needed to innovate in an impactful way. ”My program experience trained me to listen deeply to customers — not just to what they say they want but to the context and emotions underneath — which is critical in my work designing solutions for employees and employers,” she said. “It also gave me a toolkit and mindset for creativity, showing me how to think beyond the obvious answer, prototype quickly and be comfortable iterating in public.”

Read next: Shaping my journey from creative visionary to strategic product leader

Northwestern’s MMM Program is a fully integrated dual degree between the Kellogg School of Management and the Segal Design Institute at the McCormick School of Engineering. Students earn both an MBA and a Master of Science in Design Innovation.