What would be the next big feature you would launch on Uber to improve Customer Retention and Average Spend?

Question

What would be the next big feature you would launch on Uber to improve Customer Retention and Average Spend?

Imagine you are the product manager of Uber.

What would be the next big feature you would launch on this app to improve (one or both):

a. Customer Retention

b. Average Customer Spend

Asked at Uber over a year ago

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Debasis Dash · Answer 1 · 2021-09-25T13:59:05+0000

Uber is into moving things from A to B.

Clarification:

· Should the feature be targeted to any specific segment? You decide

· Is it for Uber ride as a whole of uber specific type of ride or uber eats? Uber as a company

· Should it be for app or web or both? You decide

· Any target geography? India

· What is the time we have to launch the feature? You decide

· Is there any specific metric we have to follow for customer retention and average spend? You decide

User:

Uber has two sides of customers. Demand and supply in both ride and food delivery business. As the metric is retention and spend, we will consider demand side which is nothing but customers.

There are different kind of segments of customers.

· Power users of online/app based services (20%)

· Moderate user of online/app based services (60%)

· Low/none user of online/app based service (20%)

We can either focus on first or second segment but it will be easy to create an impact on first segment as it is hard to change behavior of people.

Goal:

As mentioned our goals are below.

· Retention: DAU/WAU/MAU

· Avg spend: $ spent per user per month

Pain points/need of Power users:

· Still open for cheaper and convenient mode of transportation

· Painful to book multiple times when I use multiple mode of transportation

· Looking out for delivery of my groceries/vegetables from my favorite store

· Looking out for a person to transport my light wight but important stuff from one place to another place

Solution:

At this point I will consider all the pain points as all of them seem to have almost similar severity and reach and not to rule out any impactful potential solution that will have high retention and avg $ spent

Pain point	High level Feature
Still open for cheaper and convenient mode of transportation	Launching e-scooters with ride share
Painful to book multiple times when I use multiple mode of transportation	Multi modal journey planner and unified booking services
Looking out for delivery of my groceries/vegetables from my favorite store	Aggregator of local stores for delivery services
Looking out for a person to transport my light weight but important stuff from one place to another place	Parcel picking and drop service

Prioritization:

Feature	Retention Impact	$ Spent per month Impact	Dev Cost	GTM Cost	Time to Market
Launching e-scooters with ride share	M	L	High with capex on e-scooters	Low as Uber already caters into transportation	M
Multi modal journey planner and unified booking services	L	M	Medium as we need to integrate with multiple APIs and present journey planner	Low as Uber already caters into transportation	M
Aggregator of local stores for delivery services	H	H	High as need to build from scratch	High as it is a new category	H
Parcel picking and drop service	H	L	Low	Low as it caters to same segment	L

Based on above findings, I will prioritize parcel picking and drop service and consider take aggregator of local stores for services as next feature where there would be selected stores as pickup destination.

MVO:

As an MVO I would introduce a tab named parcel along side all rides and let user select locations and time along with comments. Most of ride booking feature can be leveraged.

Summary: To summarize, I will introduce parcel pickup service for power users to increase retention and dollar spend. This will significantly increase WAU and $ per spent per user per week.

@Bijan feedback pls...

sowhat · Answer 2 · 2018-08-27T12:07:12+0000

Explain product/feature

Its Uber

Scope

Increase retention
avg. spend

No further clarification needed

User groups

Business users
Local Commuters/short city rides
Tourists
Students
Shared rides

Pick a group: Local Commuters

Because they have a lot of options to chose from for local travel (Car, pub transport, e-bikes, walking).
Focussing on retention for this group should support repeat usage and help drive average spend

Needs/pain points

Don’t want to get into a car for a short rides too often
Want to save cost
Environment conscious
Having to make a conversation with driver for such a short drive
Effort of ordering/timing/getting into uber ride vs other options to get to destination

Prioritise them as 1,2,4,5,3 based on how big an impact they can have on retention vs cost/investment

Solutions

Offer option to pick a e-scooter/e-bike within app to get to a destination (shared bike/scooters)
Introduce e-Scooter drivers who can pick up and drop - possibly lower ride cost than car
Introduce walking/public transport route options in the app like google maps so customers use uber first instead of
Introduce driver training for short rides and add drive app features to identify if customers prefer chit chats or not and then customise uber users experience for short rides
Show how much positive impact they have on environment if they use uber share/ride (so they don’t feel conscious of using uber for local commute)

Evaluate solutions

This might require significant investment as its almost developing a new experience within uber + huge cost of owning and maintaining fleet of e-bikes/scooters. A partnership here might be an interesting opportunity to retain uber users from going to other services
This is more realistic although requires more significant development towards introducing scooter drivers (regulatory, driver supply, training, unit economics). Some customers might not be too excited about riding a scooter
This requires significant development effort on app side to aggregate public transport data/perfecting route timings using cycle other options … but this will allow uber to become the go to app and hence improve retention significantly. And possibly allow to partner and offer other cannibalising transport services such as ebikes via uber app. (Strong MOAT)
This should be fairly easy to implement and will ensure customers using uber of short rides get a better experience and continue to use the service
This might be a bit more difficult to implement and possibly deliver less impact

Prioritise them as 4,3,2,1,5

Recommendation

Given all the innovation in last mile travel due to ebikes/scooters, uber has a significant threat and therefore focusing on features such as 2/1 will help a) increase retention b) add a MOAT c) drive average spend as uber will take bigger share of short journeys away from bikes/public transport/scooters. However 4,3 are fairly low investment/high impact features on cust. exp. that should help in improving retention in short term