Uber · Strategy · Senior · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Uber redesign rewards?

Uber is a consumer marketplace app that lets people book rides and order food and other deliveries. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

product strategy
growth thinking
platform thinking
business judgment
metric design

The situation

Your VP of Growth has asked you, a senior PM on the consumer team, for a recommendation on Uber's next loyalty and incentives strategy. Uber already runs rides and food delivery at scale, is expanding into more everyday use cases, and sees that users who adopt multiple products tend to retain better. But most incentives today are fragmented, promo code based, or tied to specific flows, which makes it hard for marketing teams to run fast experiments and hard for customers to understand what they have earned. Traditional points programs are well known, but they can feel abstract, devalue over time, and may not fit a marketplace where users switch between transport and delivery. At the same time, simply issuing more discounts could hurt margins and train customers to wait for deals. Finance, support, and operations are also wary of adding liability and complexity. Leadership wants a strategy that improves acquisition, repeat usage, and cross sell across the ecosystem, while staying simple for users and flexible for local teams and partners.

What to produce

Write a 1 to 2 page strategy memo for the VP of Growth.

Your answer must

State the core user and business problems with Uber's current incentives approach, and explain why a classic points program may or may not fit Uber's business model.
Compare at least three strategic options, including maintaining the current approach, and recommend one with clear tradeoffs.
Propose the first three launch use cases and the rollout sequence across rides, Eats, membership, service recovery, or partnerships.
Define a north star metric, 2 to 4 leading metrics, and 2 to 3 guardrail metrics, including how you would detect cannibalization of full price demand.
Identify the main operational risks, such as liability, trust, abuse, internal adoption, or market level complexity, and give mitigations.

Constraints

The strategy must work across multiple Uber products, not only rides.
Do not assume Uber can win by funding a permanently richer discount program.
The user experience must be easy to understand and avoid hard to explain reward values or redemption rules.
Marketers and local teams should be able to use the system without heavy engineering support for every campaign.

Format

Use sections: problem, options, recommendation, rollout, metrics, risks.

How Uber actually played it

Long essay on why traditional points programs declined and how Uber Cash works as a flexible virtual currency for growth, with lessons on building one.

Closed-loop currency enables many growth levers
Loyalty programs need to fit the business model
Design for flexibility

Built from Uber Cash: The secret to Uber's growth and loyalty game by Bandan Singh (Productify).