Uber, Design Principles
- Year
- 2019
- Role
- Brand Strategy
Intense pressure
Sometimes the biggest opportunities to leap forward come not from wild success, but intense pressure. The conditions to redesign.
By 2018, Uber had grown to over 600 cities in 68 countries, but self-inflicted scandals led to a #DeleteUber movement, jeopardizing the company and leading to Dara Khosrowshahi becoming CEO with an agenda to change course.
In addition to regulatory and user pressure, Uber could not hire the best engineering talent; people were choosing to work at places with a clearer set of values and mission.
We began talking with a cross-functional team at Uber, representing product, government relations and communications. We explored what kind of transparency — on how Uber worked, how it set prices, how it paid drivers — could help rebuild trust.
Uber moves the world, but what moves Uber?
Ultimately, we realized that no amount of explanation would resonate, unless we could clearly articulate the Why behind Uber’s choices. We needed to start with some fundamental questions.
Designing the culture, before the marketing
Principled innovation begins with asking the right questions. This initiative came from deep internal work inside Uber’s product and engineering teams, and guidance from tech industry thought leaders, riders and drivers.
Discussions with Uber’s team members dug into motivations and guiding values. This led to open, healthy conversations between teams about what the company could commit to over the long term. There was remarkable overlap in the values the Uber team wanted to live by, but these values had not been part of the usual product development process. Instead, many choices had been made by capitalism’s default mindset: what would maximize growth?
From these reflective conversations across the team, for the first time, we documented Marketplace principles that could guide the creation of Uber’s products.
What Moves Us is both an internal operating system, a set of product design principles, and an outward facing communications campaign to tell the world how to understand Uber.
The product team adopted the design principles as the guidance system for product choices. Thousands of decisions about how riders and drivers get matched, how prices are set, and how the market is managed.
These design principles were embedded into the product development process; now when a new feature is proposed, the team needed to answer how it lived up to the principles.
Uber’s Chief Product Officer, Manik Gupta, publicly committed the company to living up to these principles.
The why and the what
Now we could give much greater transparency on how — and why — Uber made design choices. We filmed engineering and product leaders explaining the principles, and how they impact the user experience.
This work follows a recurrent theme we see at companies: publishing an inspiring purpose (or mission, or vision), can leave a wide gap between the aspiration and the company practices.
The way to connect aspirational purpose with everyday practices is through principles that shape how the company operates every day. In the same way that countries have constitutions to enshrine agreed principles, companies need the same kind of guidance for how to make decisions — whether they are product, brand, team or customer decisions.
Only in this way can brands be consistent and authentic, otherwise the old defaults — what will drive short term growth? what will get me promoted? what do other companies do? — win the day, often leading to the kind of pressure Uber faced.
Uber rebuilt trust, went public in 2019, and continues to lead the market.
