Uber’s biggest data challenge

Some may be surprised Uber has any data challenges, given its explosion around the world. But the rideshare company took to the virtual stage at Domopalooza to discuss its data challenges and how it set about solving them. 

Director of global travel and expense at Uber, Anthea Crittle, said her business unit had a number of different data sources that needed to be consolidated and presented to the business in a dynamic and transparent way. 

“We were tasked with making data and analytics available to the business teams for transparency of metrics to help drive outcomes,” Crittle said. “It was something that had previously been provided monthly, but the businesses needed the data in a more dynamic way.

“We needed to find a solution to fit within the existing team capacity, and also one prepared to scale as we did.”.

Anticipating this request, the team had already examined various platforms and chosen Domo. “Domo helped us around connections, and it was scalable with good UX. Also, having a mobile first strategy is important at Uber, which we could achieve," Crittle said.

“In this way, our teams could glean insights from their own dashboards which empowered them to drive their own outcomes.” 

Uber senior T&E reporting analyst, Rob Wassum, said Uber’s biggest data challenge was getting everything into the one place. 

“A visualisation and aggregation tool with speed was key for us. Domo did it all for us, including a drag-and-drop interface, for ease of use without needing data scientists," he said. “This way, every click comes down to something actionable for the teams. Scale was also a big thing for us, we had multiple dashboards previously, and now we love the ability to create two diff dashboards and add everyone in. Also, the reporting functionality keeps metrics at the top of people’s minds."

Crittle added the results speak for themselves. “We very quickly got the data to the teams and by giving the team access to these key metrics we reduced some analytics access by over 50 per cent. This is because we were able to see data trends in a short space of time and action them, which drove results,” she said.

“We leveraged our tech teams for the pilot of the dashboards we created for the business, getting important feedback and making adjustments."

The work has led to other initiatives driven internally using Domo to track metrics and make them visible. Crittle said it's become an enterprise-wide application.

“By giving the leadership team access to data, they were engaged in the solution. Connecting people to data and allowing them to interact with it showcases the power of data and the platform," he said.

“This helped to evolve our team brand as well by adding value to the business to empower teams to achieve results."

Having solved that business problem, Crittle saw a future opportunity in workflow functionality simply by leveraging the data already in the platform. 

“We are also planning on using the data to highlight good employee experience [EX] and best practices. All teams have visibility on the whole end to end process," he said.  EX is very important to Uber, and we want to incentivise employees to do the right thing and create a positive environment.”

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