Uber app strategy: bundle ride-hailing and food delivery, or unbundle them
Company: Uber
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Uber, which offers consumers both ride-hailing and food delivery (Uber Eats). Should food delivery be its own app, separate from the app people use to book rides, or should both services live in a single app? Make a recommendation and defend it.
```hint Compare the two jobs
Before weighing app setups, contrast how someone booking a ride and someone ordering dinner use the product: when they open it, how urgent they are, how long they browse and what they need to trust. Then judge each setup against those differences and against what Uber needs as a business.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Is this a change to how the services are packaged today, with existing customers who might have to move or download something, or a clean-slate choice?
- Does the decision cover only the consumer app, or also the apps used by drivers, couriers and restaurants?
- What should the decision optimize for: growth of the delivery business, total spend per customer across services, or the cost of building and running the apps?
- Must the answer hold in every market, or can it differ by country?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- The goal behind the decision, stated before any option is judged
- How the ride and delivery use cases differ for customers, and what they share
- The realistic options laid out and compared on explicit customer and business criteria
- A clear recommendation, plus the evidence or conditions that would reverse it
- Metrics that validate the decision, and the risks of changing what existing customers use today
### Follow-up Questions
- Splitting or merging apps is hard to A/B test. How would you gather evidence before committing?
- If grocery, parcel delivery and other services keep getting added, at what point does your answer change?
- Whichever setup you choose, how would you keep booking a ride fast for someone in a hurry?
Overview: A product strategy question asking whether Uber should run ride-hailing and food delivery in one consumer app or split them into separate apps. It tests how a candidate compares customer use cases, cross-selling, acquisition, engineering cost and brand, makes a clear recommendation, and plans how to validate it.