Accessible Ride-Hailing Product Design for Riders with Disabilities
Company: Uber
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design a car-sharing platform, modeled on Uber, for people with disabilities. Explain which riders you would design for first, what goes wrong for them when they try to get a ride today, which product changes you would build and in what order, and how you would know the service is succeeding.
```hint Follow one trip end to end
Different disabilities break different steps of a ride. Once you have picked whom to serve, walk their trip from booking to reaching the building entrance and mark the step where it fails most often.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Which disabilities are in scope: mobility impairments, blindness or low vision, deafness or hard of hearing, cognitive disabilities, or all of them?
- Is this a new standalone service, or an accessibility offering inside Uber's existing app and driver network?
- Does "car sharing" here mean rides with a driver, as on Uber, or access to vehicles the rider drives themselves?
- Which market is this for, given that accessibility law and the supply of wheelchair-accessible vehicles differ from country to country?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A scoped choice of which riders and disabilities to serve first, with the reason
- Pain points across the whole trip: booking, waiting, boarding, riding, drop-off and the final stretch to the door
- Solutions on both the rider side and the vehicle-and-driver side, prioritized with explicit criteria
- How the service stays reliable and financially sustainable when suitable vehicles and trained drivers are scarce
- A primary metric with guardrails, and the risks specific to this rider population
### Follow-up Questions
- Accessible vehicles cost more to buy and operate and may sit idle between requests; how would you get enough of them on the platform, and who pays?
- What would you do about drivers who cancel after learning about a rider's wheelchair or guide dog?
- How would you launch and evaluate the service in one city without withholding it from riders who need it?
Overview: A product design question that asks how to build a car-sharing service, modeled on Uber, for people with disabilities. It tests choosing which riders to serve first, mapping pain points across the whole trip, prioritizing rider-side and vehicle-supply solutions, and defining success metrics with guardrails.