Uber Carshare’s international expansion

Transforming Uber Carshare's backend systems to enable its expansion into the United States and Canada.

Product Uber Carshare

Role Product Manager

Timeframe January 2023 - September 2023

Results Uber Carshare successfully launched in United States and Canada in September 2023

Background

After Uber acquired Car Next Door in January 2022, they planned to launch Uber Carshare in the US and Canada by mid 2023.

Car Next Door was an Australian start up and the whole platform was built to cater for the Australian landscape, this meant that international expansion required us to look at upgrading the system to allow for multiple regions. This included currency, units of measurements, spelling, maps, addresses, timezone, fuel type, tax implications, payment types, methods, date format, member’s agreement, vehicle brand, types, make, and much more.

We also ensured to look further into the future since the longer term plan was to expand into non-english speaking countries and to cater for US’s Spanish speaking community and Canada’s French community.

My role

As a Product Manager in the Backstage squad, my role was to look at every backend process to determine what changes would be required for the system to function in US and Canada, while ensuring any changes would also allow for further expansion into Europe and other regions in the future.

I successfully identified all areas within Car Next Door’s admin system that required localisation changes, and mapped out processes like infringements, fuel refunds, payments and disbursements. I conducted research and user interviews, managed stakeholders, and worked closely with various parts of the business including finance, sales, marketing, admin, customer support, car operations, as well as leadership, design and engineering teams.

The process

1. Understanding the current state

Car Next Door’s admin site ‘Turbo Admin’ was built for Australia. In the early days of Car Next Door, the thought of expansion into other countries were far away and because of this, everything was single region focused with no flexibility to add in different currencies, payment types or other variations.

Below image shows the Turbo Admin homepage. The site has 22 pages, some with multiple subsequent pages, for example payment related pages were quite elaborate since the system had to allow for different payment methods and be easy to understand for agents to minimise mistakes.

My first task was to layout all the pages of the admin site to identify what areas needed to change. I simply screen grabbed every available page and started to mark out the requirements in Figjam. This process took some time as I needed to speak with all business functions who interacted with the page, often going between few different teams that used the page or sections within the page.

Labelled in green are the pages that did not require any changes, labelled in red are the pages requiring changes, and labelled in orange showing nice to have’s.

Here is a close up of one of the sections from the Figjam file, since this document started to get overwhelming for anyone who I shared it with, I ended up creating individual files that contained detailed information on changes required for that page only.

2. Outlining requirements for simple changes

Each section of the Turbo Admin that required changes were outlined in a Figma doc showing before and after state. These requirements are a results of many conversations with the internal teams who use the page and at each stage of the design stages, I setup a group meeting to go over and discussed changes to ensure everyone involved was aligned and aware. This meant there were upfront time required to get these pages into development but I feel it was well worth the effort since development resources were scarce.

Below is an example of the document handed over to the engineering team for the admin payment and management page. This page controlled how the owners on the platform would get paid and when, the actual work itself was not complex once we worked out what needed to be done.

This is another example of a relatively simple requirement. This page was used by agents to review fuel refunds that were not processed by our automation. If any of the automated checks flagged a fuel refund, agents would see a list of these refunds and manually review them. For this page, it was mostly changing units of measurement and simple logic change for the approval button because US & Canada payments worked differently to Australia.

2. Outlining requirements for complex changes

There were a few sections of Turbo Admin that required a lot of attention and care, below are couple of examples of problems we faced and how we solved them.

Payments and disbursement in US & Canada

Payments was a complex and important piece of the puzzle, as always I first mapped out the current state for Australia then mapped out how we were going to do it in US and Canada. What made this process complex was that in US & Canada, Uber wanted us to go through their payment system.

In Australia, user’s account balance worked a little like a normal bank account, each member had a Carshare account which would list all incoming and outgoing funds. When the account went into negative, Carshare would collect the amount from the user’s nominated credit card. If a fuel refund was process, that would go into the user’s account balance as a credit, from there, they had the option to withdrawing it into their bank accounts or leaving the credit there for future trips.

Now with Uber payment, we had to reinvent this concept of Carshare account balance, we no longer needed this interim account because all payments would go through Uber payments. The issue with this was that Uber payments worked more like a credit system where it was not able to refund more than the debited total, making refunds difficult. To counter this, we created a manual process that would allow fund greater than sum of debit.

Below flows shows the difference in Australia versus United States & Canada. This was a initial lunch state, and we planned on getting every member into the Uber system and remove the Australian flow in the future.

The actual changes in the Turbo Admin page was quite simple, but it did require us to create some new status and work flows for the US & Canada operations team so they could keep track of various infringements as we expected some wait time on each after we initially got in touch with the issuing authority.

These are only small samples of what was worked on during the expansion into US & Canada. Over 22 pages and around 40 subpages went through an overhaul to ensure it was fit for United States and Canada as well as further expansion into new regions.

Once we all agreed on how payments would work for US & Canada, I mapped out how this would affect our admin pages and created docs to support these changes.

Infringements in US & Canada

Another complex piece was infringements, the main risk here was that having demerit point wrongly assigned to a car owner’s driver’s licence would cause a lot of trouble and would require intervention with the infringement issuing authority.

In Australia, all states have a simple process in reassigning a fine. In most states, it’s as simple as logging on to a website, putting in your details and the assignee’s details. The fine is then reassigned by the issuing authority. In the US & Canada however, this was not the case, and made the process complex.

In collaboration with the US & Canada team, we decided on the below flow. The main difference was that in US & Canada, we would identify if the infringement had a point violation or not, if it doesn’t, we would charge the borrower’s credit card for the fine the pay the owner back. If it does have a point violation, it would go to the US & Canada operations team to contact the issuing authority to try to have the infringement reassigned. We were not expecting huge amount of infringements to come through initially so the idea was to work out an automated process once we had some real life examples to work with.

Results

  • Uber Carshare successfully launched in United States and Canada in September 2023.

  • We monitored the processes closely after the launch into US & Canada and fixed a minor bugs but no major issues were found.

  • We continued to worked on updating the processes from MVP state to ideal future state.

Reflection

  • We were given a deadline to launch into the US and Canada, this meant that we aimed for MVP states and this required us to cut some corners in engineering creating technical debt. In the coming months we were busy fixing these debts and bugs that were caused by these tech debt. Knowing this I may have pushed harder to get a better timeline from the business at the start although I am not sure if Uber would have done anything different.

  • Communication was very important in this project, having to speak with so many different teams and getting everyone aligned was difficult at times but was well worth it when there were no surprises with launch going smoothly. Creating flows in Figjam and sharing visuals with the team really helped with getting alignment quickly.

  • This project required us to work cross-functionally since it affected almost every aspect of the business. I learnt the complexity this can bring with the squads blocking each other’s work creating dependencies which are tied to each squad’s OKRs. Navigating these complexities with a win-win amicable attitude wasn’t always easy but well worth the effort!

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