Uber wants to add food to your ride
Uber began as a ride-hailing company, but its ambition to become the “Amazon of transportation” has pushed its leaders to experiment with bus fleets, transit and its growing food delivery business.
Peter Deng, who spent nearly a decade at Facebook before joining Uber Technologies Inc., wants to relieve riders’ stress from their daily lives by unlocking more experiences through the Uber app.
The Associated Press recently spoke with Deng about how, as Head of Rider, he aims to offer rides tailored to every occasion and to localize the experience in more than 700 cities across the globe.
Uber has been prompting riders on their way home from the airport to order food through Uber Eats. How is that going?
Our orientation is to serve the customer, to make their lives easier. That was the hypothesis of one of our product managers who was like, “Hey, I sometimes get hungry when I’m going home from the airport,” and I’m like, “Oh my God, me too.” You’re going home to an empty fridge, it’s not a pleasant experience for anyone involved.
Where is Uber prompting airport riders to order food?
We’ve done small-scale tests in the U.S. Depending on what we learn, we take those insights and build a better product.
Does Uber coordinate in the background to time the delivery with the Uber arrival?
When you experience it, it feels magical, and let’s just keep it that way. The time it takes to order and prepare and deliver food is for some folks the amount of time it takes to get home from the airport.
You have a bus service in Cairo. What need are you aiming to fill with Uber Bus?
We’re looking to satisfy people’s daily needs, and getting to and from work, that commute experience, is a daily need. Getting more people into an affordable, high-quality bus with air conditioning, and getting people to and from work on a predictable basis, that’s the need that we’re solving. In Egypt, we believe we can provide a better experience at a very good price...taking that stress out of people’s everyday lives.
Are the routes predetermined? Or can the driver change a route based on an incoming ride request?
We have a lot of good insights into where people go to and from for work, because people use Uber. And from that we can optimize which routes are the best for us to run each of the bus lines.
We’re doing the heavy lifting on the back end to figure out which bus driver to dispatch, and at what time, and over the day we might learn from our insights that there are better routes than others. When the driver has set out, after they’ve made their first pickup, there is a route we predetermined that they will follow, based on the insights I was talking about.