Customer-Focused Innovation at DoorDash
Cindy Gao (MMM '23) shares how Northwestern's MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program prepared her to shape meal experiences at DoorDash.
Cindy Gao (MMM '23) 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.
DoorDash was founded in 2013 and 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 early, compared to the rest of DoorDash," said Cindy, 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 MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM) program — a dual-degree program between Northwestern Engineering and the Kellogg School of Management.
"Coming from big companies, I was used to starting every problem with data analysis," Cindy said. "MMM 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”.
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, Cindy 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," Cindy 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, Cindy'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.
She credits MMM with helping her develop the mindset needed to innovate in an impactful way.
"MMM 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," Cindy 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."