At the time of writing, Adam was Global Product Marketing Lead at Uber but has since moved into a new position as Group Product Marketing Manager at Coinbase.

At Uber, we’ve seen tremendous growth over the past decade which can make life as a PMM more challenging - with so many customers around the world, their needs vary significantly from area to area.

In this article, I’ll discuss Uber’s product marketing approach, how we define an insight, and share six tactical recommendations, based on my experience, for ways PMMs can build in a localized way, with the customer in mind.

Before I dive in, I want to set some context on the Uber business, so you can see the environment in which PMMs at Uber are building.

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Uber’s global marketplace

Over the last decade, we've seen, obviously, tremendous growth in our marketplace since we launched in 2009. We're now in over 700 cities across 65 countries, and on six continents - still waiting for that first ride request from Antarctica, but it will come.

Uber’s global marketplace growth

We now have over 100 million active monthly platform users, this is defined as someone taking a ride, ordering food, making a freight delivery, or riding a new modality instrument like a scooter or a bike.

Also recently, we surpassed 4 million people earning on our platform globally, which is quite substantial. That's more than the number of people who work for Walmart, that's also more than the number of people listed in the US military.

When you think about the scale of our platform, it's quite significant. Another metric I'm quite proud of as a product marketer at Uber is we recently cracked the top 100 of Interbrand's top global brands, which is really exciting.

More than ridesharing

We've obviously now scaled to something much bigger than a ride-sharing platform and that makes the job of a PMM a little bit more difficult.

The customer will now be quite different across all of these areas in which we're expanding our business. Ridesharing is still important, it makes up the majority of our gross bookings globally, however:

  • Eats is in hyper-growth mode.
  • We are now investing in new modalities like bikes and scooters.
  • Uber Freight is growing in Europe.
  • We also have transit integrations in the Uber app, which I've been using and enjoying in London, which is quite helpful. And,
  • Of course, future vets that obviously catch a lot of headlines; autonomous vehicle development and our vertical takeoff and landing aerial flight service, which we'll start piloting next year in select cities around the world.

Supporting teams

Underneath all of this, we have a school of teams supporting the business on these platforms.

  • The marketplace controls pricing,
  • Maps and routing control your ETAs and dispatch a driver to come to pick you up as a rider.
  • Payments, which is something that I focus on as a product marketer at Uber, control all the inflows and outflows of money on our platform, which is billions of dollars a month.
  • Safety and trust - ensuring you as a user feel safe every time you get into a car no matter where you're traveling in the world, and
  • Data to build better products and experiences.

With this in mind, I often have to ask myself, who are our customers?

Who are our customers?

It really does vary by the line of business you're working on. But now we're starting to see some common threads of users using multiple products across our platform, which makes the product marketing challenge a little bit greater, but also a meaty challenge for us to dive into.

Who are Uber's customers?


I want to share a couple of our core Uber product marketing values, which will look very familiar to you, hopefully.

Uber PMM values

Anytime a new product marketer walks through the door, these are some of the values that are instilled within them on day one.

We are the voice of the user to product, and the voice of the product to users

Number one, we're the voice of the user to product and tech teams, the number of times we've had to come in and champion the user with product and engineering teams is numerous, but they're getting better.

In Uber's early days, it was much more about shipping as fast as we can with little regard for what the customer need actually is because, in hyper-growth, you just go.

Fortunately, we're no longer in that situation today from a customer mindset point of view, we can actually champion the user and get ahead of that.

Conversely, product marketers are the voice of the product to our users. So every time you interact with the app, you see a message in the app, you pass by an out-of-home display board at the bus stop or on the tube that is all something that is PMM controlled.

We are left-brained and right-brained

Naturally, we are left-brained and right-brained - highly analytical, we can distill large datasets, but we're also empathetic and creative and that manifests in a lot of the campaigns you see out in the wild.

We build for business impact and scale

Of course, we build for business impact and scale. Scale is probably the toughest part about the scope of work PMMs undertake at Uber. Over 65 countries, 700 cities, how do you build the features and products that are going to scale effectively across all of these diverse groups when the audience has such diverse needs?

Uber's product marketing (PMM) values


Uber's product marketing approach

At the core product marketing at Uber, we focus on owning our product adoption metrics. There's a couple of fundamental questions we have to ask before we sign up for specific OKRs and the KPIs that go along with them.

  • Who are we building for?
  • What value does the product actually have in the users’ life?
  • How will users discover it?

Insights and definition

Where this starts is usually in a problem space we're all familiar with, who's it for, and what is the business impact it could possibly have?

Ideas

In this insights definition phase, this is where we partner with our PMs, UX research team, and other marketing cross-functional partners, to really dig in and understand what our learning agenda is in actually speaking to customers to understand what they need.

Product requirement document

Once we have our insights defined, and our research initiative out the door, we can come back and actually start a product requirements document. We know who we're building for, we have some directional insights. Now, let's put together a document that actually clarifies and crystallizes what we're going to build.

While the PM is writing a PRD, this is often when I kick off my own marketing brief. Oftentimes, some of my marketing brief inputs are inputs to the PRD as well. The two things that come to mind for me when I'm developing a marketing brief are:

  1. What is the business impact this campaign could have? And
  2. What is the user need or the market gap this is going to fill?

Go-to-market strategy

Launch

With the PRD and the marketing brief now complete, we're ready to go to market, and of course, that marketing brief will enable creative kickoffs, engaging with our cross-functional partners across the company, it will have outlines for positioning, messaging pillars, all the things you need to develop a strategic campaign.

We are far from done though, once we launch. At Uber, this is especially true. Remember, 700 cities, 65 countries, how are we going to build a campaign that scales outside of London or New York, or Mumbai?

This is where we lean on our regional teams, our operations teams on the ground to equip us with insights that actually help define or refine the positioning and messaging within a campaign on the ground.

Grow

Playbook

Before we are ready to officially grow a product in a market, we often partner with those teams on the ground to playbook our campaign and ensure everyone is speaking the same language about the feature when it lands in the market.

Uber's approach to product marketing strategies 

What is an insight at Uber?

Getting back to customer obsession and why it's so important at Uber, I want to define how we think of insights at the company. There are really three categories in which we are distilling insights from a very wide funnel.

Behavioral

Number one is behavioral. This describes the motivations or behaviors behind something we observed through research.

Example: Instant Pay

An example I can give you is we had a payments product in the United States called Instant Pay, where our drivers can cash out their earnings up to five times per day on a debit card linked to their account.

When I saw the data it reflected drivers were actually hitting this maximum several times a week, I was curious why that could be the case. At Uber, we are famous for championing weekly payments, drivers get their payment on a weekly cadence instead of monthly, like much of Europe or bi-weekly, like North America.

We dug into the data and talked to customers, we understood there are on-platform expenses that need to be taken care of during the course of a day driving on the platform. Petrol, lunch, other miscellaneous car maintenance you have to take care of.

These are things that are really important and not understood through data but understood through conversation. Those are behavioral insights.

Market

Market insights - competitive trends, what's happening in investment in the space?

Example: Uber Money

An example we looked at recently with the launch of Uber Money last month was the amount of FinTech investing happening across the world, specifically in LATAM. That was a key insight for us to understand there's actually a market opportunity for us to start offering financial services to a lot of our customers in that market.