DoorDash’s Winning Team on Urban Quest — More Competitive Than They Expected
The DoorDash New Verticals team came to Urban Quest’s Melbourne CBD team building experience expecting a fun afternoon. What they didn’t expect was to discover how competitive they actually were.
More Competitive Than They Expected
The winning team’s first observation after the event was the one nobody had anticipated coming in:
“We learned we’re a little more competitive than we expected.”
That specific surprise — discovering a competitive instinct that didn’t show up in meetings — is one of the most consistent observations Urban Quest events produce across corporate groups. The format creates real stakes: a leaderboard, a time limit, teams racing against each other across Melbourne’s CBD. In that context, people who consider themselves collaborative and measured find themselves running between challenge locations and genuinely invested in whether their team wins.
The DoorDash team leaned into it:
“I think we were just all committed to finding the clues, running between spots.”
The Moment They Became a Team
There’s usually a specific moment in an Urban Quest event when a group stops being individuals doing tasks together and becomes an actual team. For the DoorDash New Verticals team, that moment was identifiable and specific:
“I think we also all met each other when Abby started running and we all started running and committed and stepped up as a team.”
One person made a decision, everyone followed, and suddenly they were operating as a unit. That shift — from polite coordination to genuine collective commitment — is the outcome that transfers back to the workplace. The team that has experienced it once knows what it feels like and can recognise when it’s happening, or not happening, in their normal working context.
Different Perspectives on the Same Problem
The DoorDash team’s approach to the harder challenges became one of their key tactical discoveries:
“At different moments we realised we’d all look at a problem differently. If we couldn’t get an answer, each of us would look at it separately, think, and we could crack it through a different perspective.”
This is the mechanism that makes Urban Quest challenges genuinely collaborative rather than just social. When a clue is designed to reward lateral thinking, the first instinct — usually the most obvious interpretation — is often wrong. A team that pools different perspectives doesn’t just have more ideas; it has a better chance of approaching the problem from the angle that unlocks it.
“We learned how to problem solve together and how working as a team towards a common goal we can be competitive together.”
What the Balance of Mind and Movement Produces
The DoorDash team noticed something specific about the Urban Quest format that distinguishes it from purely mental or purely physical activities:
“We learned the balance of using our minds, using our feet, and we played to win.”
That balance — strategic thinking combined with physical movement across a real urban environment — is deliberate. The cognitive load of solving challenges while navigating Melbourne’s laneways and landmarks, under competitive time pressure, creates a different kind of collaboration than a boardroom exercise or a static activity does. It produces urgency, shared physical experience, and the specific kind of trust that comes from having genuinely relied on each other.
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DoorDash’s New Verticals team participated in Urban Quest’s Melbourne CBD team building experience. Their team placed first on the day.
