Zachary Schendel

As Head of Research at DoorDash, Zach Schendel leads a dynamic team that spans quantitative, qualitative, and operational research across the company’s diverse ecosystem, which includes consumers, dashers, and merchants. Each of these customer groups has distinct needs and challenges, with some overlapping concerns. The research team is tasked with understanding these complexities and driving product innovation while maintaining the speed and agility that DoorDash demands in a highly competitive environment.

Schendel’s background, including his time at Netflix and Unilever, equips him with a unique perspective on the balance between rigorous research and the fast-paced, creative demands of a tech-driven and customer-obsessed company like DoorDash. His team doesn’t just conduct research; they facilitate and democratize it across the organization, empowering other teams to engage directly with customers and derive actionable insights from data.

In this session, we will discuss how the research team manages the balance between speed and quality, the strategies they use to communicate research findings, and how they ensure that research drives impactful decision-making in a complex and ever-changing environment.

Attendees will learn:

• Balancing speed with research quality: Discover how to navigate the challenge of delivering and presenting high-quality customer insights quickly for maximum impact.
• Driving customer-centric innovation: Learn how to educate colleagues about the experiences of customers using innovative methods to inform product design and strategy.
• Democratizing consumer research across the organization: Understand how DoorDash empowers its employees to conduct research through a well-structured facilitation process, ensuring that customer obsession permeates every level of the company and drives meaningful innovation.