Associate Manager, Product Operations

DoorDash•San Francisco, CA

12d•Hybrid

About The Position

DoorDash Labs is an independent team within DoorDash focused on exploring robotics and automation to transform last-mile logistics. This role is crucial for commercializing autonomy and robotics, ensuring merchant partners can reliably interact with robots for order handoffs and troubleshooting. The position owns the merchant side of this equation, developing strategies and operational mechanisms to onboard merchants, maintain their performance, and create a feedback loop for product and engineering. The role involves owning merchant adoption and performance KPIs for autonomy, defining success metrics, and driving improvements. It requires building operational mechanisms for merchant onboarding, scaling them across markets, and partnering with sales and operations teams to recruit merchant cohorts and test new features. The Associate Manager will define merchant performance benchmarks, manage accountability, and establish a feedback loop from the field to product and engineering. They will also act as the voice of the merchant within DoorDash Labs, advocating for merchant constraints in product development and launch decisions.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in business, operations, or a related field, or equivalent related experience.
3–6 years of experience in Strategy & Operations, Merchant/Partner Success, Product Operations, Business Strategy, or a closely related field — ideally with time spent owning a partner-facing KPI end-to-end.
Experience building operational mechanisms from scratch — onboarding flows, performance reviews, escalation paths, feedback loops — not just running mechanisms someone else designed.
Comfortable in the field, spending time with merchants and on-the-ground ops teams.
Ability to think in metrics: define a KPI, instrument it, and tell the difference between a real signal and noise.
Clear communication across audiences — translating frontline merchant pain into crisp product asks, and translating product/engineering tradeoffs back into language merchants and field teams understand.
Bias toward action in ambiguous, early-stage environments.
Energized by problems that don't yet have an owner or a process.

Nice To Haves

Experience launching new technology, hardware, or operationally complex products with external partners.

Responsibilities

Own merchant adoption and performance KPIs for autonomy end-to-end — defining what "successful merchant interaction with a robot" means, instrumenting it, and driving improvement against it.
Build the playbooks and operational mechanisms to onboard merchants to autonomy — from first conversation through training, go-live, and steady-state ops — and scale them across markets.
Partner with sales, account management, and field ops to recruit and ramp the right merchant cohorts for each stage of the product, and design experiments that test new merchant-facing features and handoff models.
Define merchant performance benchmarks (handoff success rate, dwell time, dasher/robot interaction quality, merchant CSAT) and run the cadence that holds partners and internal teams accountable to them.
Stand up the feedback loop from the field back to product and engineering — turning merchant complaints, edge cases, and frontline observations into prioritized inputs that change what we build next.
Be the voice of the merchant inside Labs: advocating for their constraints in product reviews, roadmap planning, and launch decisions.