Anonymous
Uber's mission: reinvent how the world moves
Uber rides mission: get people from point A to B
I have some questions first about the decline in usage metrics.
What usage metrics specifically are we seeing decline?
When did the dropoff start? was it sudden or gradual?
How big was the change relative to what we've seen in the past?
How important is the change? Is it endangering the core function of the product?
If the viability of the core product is jeopardized, we should probably focus on fixing the core product rather than launching a new product (unless we think the new product could fix the usage decline). These questions will help us understand the dropoff and address it.
Next I have questions about motivation for the new product.
Do we have a mission for our new product? Do we know how it interacts with the existing core product? That will help us understand if the viability is jeopardized. If it remains viable, likely we want to continue with the launch, but we want to make sure we can evaluate it. It may be hard to evaluate the launch if our metrics are in a free-fall. So we should want to see our metrics have stabilized before launching the new product.
Do we know what KPIs we'd want to use to evaluate the new product? Perhaps % of our users who used the product. Given potential for network effects in the Uber marketplace, we may want to run this as a market-level A/B. We can either pick a few markets by hand where we'd like to implement this and then use a synthetic control to create a synthetic comparison group of other markets as a control. Or we can do a stratified random sample and implement the program in the areas selected for treatment. I would recommend the former so we can maximize the success of the new program.
We should also have success criteria, e.g., we will expand the experiment if utilization exceeds 20%. Once the experiment has run, we can determine whether it met the success criteria, and if so, roll it out to a larger treatment aea for additional study.