Uber is the largest and fastest growing start-up on Earth, worth $68 billion and now live in 66 countries and 507 cities worldwide.

Uber’s mission is to make transportation as reliable as running water -- everywhere, for everyone. In 2009 Uber started to solve a simple problem - how do you get a ride at the touch of a button? Six years and over a billion trips later, they've started tackling an even greater challenge: reducing congestion and pollution in cities by getting more people into fewer cars.

In this interview the PEX Network's Senior Conference Director, Joel De Figueiredo, speaks with Matt Atkin, Senior Operations Manager at Uber about how Uber's innovative, collaborative culture and operating models, as well as the use of technology and process resource optimisation promote productivity and best-practice around the World.

"The distance between perception and reality is the innovator's playground" Travis Kalanick, Co-Founder, Uber

About the Speaker: Matt Atkin, Senior Operations Manager, Uber

After a brief career in investment banking at Citi and later at Deutsche Bank, Matt joined Uber in 2012 to help expand the company's operations domestically and internationally. He spent the first 5 months launching operations in Boston, Phoenix, and Park City while advising launches in Baltimore, Minneapolis, Miami and Sacramento. He then spent the next 9 months in Europe, where he advised and supervised launches in France, Germany, and a host of Eastern European nations while guiding Stockholm through Uber's first international regulatory crisis.

Matt's last launch was in Zurich, Switzerland in the summer of 2013. Since then he moved back to San Francisco where he helps to lead Uber's PRO Team (Process, Resource, & Optimization), a centralized Ops team focused on scaling Uber as efficiently as possible. He currently manages four teams on PRO: Analytics & Strategy, Uber Labs, Localization, and Internal Documentation.

Matt gave a presentation at PEX & Performance Management Europe on 10-12 October 2016 in Amsterdam and before the event Joel spoke in depth about the past, present and future of Uber and how operational excellence, organisational culture and technology is and will continue to be a contributor to success.

"Our culture here at Uber is aligned closely with letting the best idea win"

What have you witnessed within operations during your four years at Uber that have contributed to your $68 billion start-up result?

I believe there are a number of factors that have contributed to our ability to grow and build our business, but at the core of it I believe the main factors are:

• People: I feel we’ve been extremely fortunate to attract and retrain some of the smartest and most driven employees that I’ve ever had the pleasure of working alongside. Managers at Uber are encouraged to hire employees that we deem to be smarter than ourselves in order to constantly raise the bar.

• A love for problem solving: if there’s something all Uber employees have in common, it’s a love to solve tough challenges. There’s no shortage of tough problems to solve in the world of transportation and logistics; being creative and considering new approaches to making transportation as reliable as running water is what keeps us fired up about going to work day after day.

• Our culture: beyond a love for problem solving, I believe we’ve got one of the most innovative and exciting company cultures out there. We celebrate risk-taking -- failures aren’t just “okay”, they’re encouraged. Failure means you’re pushing yourself and being creative. We love to hustle and we love working cross-functionally to solve new problems each and every week.

What are the cultural traits that have allowed you to make this huge step?

There are a number of cultural traits Uber employees have in common that I believe have contributed to our success thus far. A few of them include a strong work ethic -- something we refer to as “hustle”. If there’s an issue with one of our internal tools, operations teams regularly go into all-hands-on-deck mode, not afraid to manually carry out processes previously managed by software. If anything ever goes wrong, such as a technology outage, operations teams will go to great lengths to make sure the drivers and riders who depend on us are heard, which sometimes means that operations teams will work throughout the night to respond to support inquiries and then return to run post-mortem analyses so we can fix and prevent problems from occurring again.

I’m proud to say that I believe Uber is a true meritocracy, one where the best idea wins, and I’m excited to work in an environment that isn’t overly bureaucratic (despite our growth) nor overly hierarchical. Innovation and creativity is celebrated throughout the company, no matter where you’re located geographically or organizationally.

In what way do you see yourself as a competitor to other industries given your unique business model and way you talk to customers?

Uber was launched on a simple premise: to provide an affordable, reliable ride in cities around the world. This kicked off at a time when actually getting an affordable, reliable ride was all but impossible, no matter where you’re located in the world. We actually never set out to go and compete in specific industries or which any specific companies or entities; we’ve always thought first about problems and potential solutions.

What differentiates you from your competitors, both traditional industries and the $bn Start-Up Club?

When it comes to traditional industries, I believe we’re more willing to try creative approaches to everyday challenges. When it comes to other tech companies, I believe our people are more excited about problem solving and our challenges, and are more willing to work hard to find the right solution.

How has your relationship with contractors and third parties helped your rise to the top?

At a high level, there are two groups of contractors that we at Uber interact with regularly: contractors that utilize the Uber platform to provide a service to the general public (for example: Uber Driver Partners) and contractors that provide a service to Uber.

To address the latter group first, we do contract with various third parties when the need arises. Being a part of a company that’s evolving and innovating so rapidly means that sometimes we need to bring in assistance from third parties on various initiatives while we recruit for full time employees -- we’re not too different from most other companies of our size in that regard.

When people tend to think about “Uber” and “contractors”, they generally refer to the largest group of contractors that we interact with: Uber Partners, the drivers that utilize the Uber platform to get matches with riders. Our relationship with drivers on the Uber Platform is everything. Being a contractor that utilizes Uber means ultimate flexibility: drivers can choose when and where to work, fitting it in around other things that are important to them, such as spending time with family, finishing a degree at university, or pursuing other goals. Because drivers have such a high degree of flexibility, it’s incredibly important that we stay closely attuned to driver preferences and hear them when they experience pain points.

"There’s no getting around the fact that human talent has been and continues to be a key to success."

What specific role have tools, technology, software and external expertise provided to this success?

Tools and technology have certainly played crucial roles in Uber’s development. We’re constantly evaluating whether we should build or buy technology that can make streamline manual processes performed by Operations teams. At the end of the day, however, it’s people that really need to customize software or other technology that’s purchased from a third party or built internally -- there’s no getting around the fact that human talent has been and continues to be a key to success. Even the best third party software needs to be adjusted to work well.

Could you tell us a little about the set-up of the PRO Team at Uber?

The PRO Team at Uber is our Process, Resource, and Optimization team, tasked with optimizing our Operations teams around the world. The dozens of teams on PRO roughly fall into three main categories: those staffed with internal experts who have thrived as being the best of the best from city operations teams, others composed of external experts in areas such as experimentation and analytics, as well as a few more functional teams we’re incubating or revamping.

How do you find the best processes and duplicate them in other parts of the World, and how do you overcome the main stumbling blocks to a smooth implementation of these processes, such as regulation or operational risk?

Our culture here at Uber is aligned closely with letting the best idea win, transparency, and hustle. This means that finding the next best practice is no more difficult than encouraging teams to find the best possible solution to the problem. We’ve also found that providing tools for Operations teams to prove whether their idea is the best also helps. Overall, however, the key for us is really in the people here at Uber -- one thing I think we all have in common is that we love to problem solve and experiment.

How does each of the four teams you manage contribute to process and operational efficiency, and what impact does this have on Uber’s strategic bottom line, time and money?

The teams I manage delve into measuring problems (Analytics Team), evaluating potential solutions (Analytics & Experimentation Teams, together), and documenting solutions so teams globally can learn how to implement them (Internal Documentation Team). Each of these three teams directly contribute to process and operational efficient by their very nature.

Separately, I also manage our localization team, which is tasked with translating and localizing all the text that you see in Uber’s apps and websites. Although a bit different from the others, localization has as much to do with impacting Uber’s bottom line (or more) than the others -- people who buy products that they can understand, and overwhelmingly convert more regularly when they read about a product in their native tongue.

How do you motivate employees and drive innovation at Uber?

We seek out and hire problem solvers, people who get fired up by tough problems and who love to run through walls to solve them. However, at the same time, we’ve certainly done things to encourage people to innovate more efficiently, more effectively, and more frequently. Some of my favorite approaches include regularly sharing knowledge about best practices, making sure that people are rewarded for great experiments as well as breaking down the barriers to experimentation.

What is next for Uber and the PRO Team and how do you plan to get there?

We like to keep our specific plans for the future pretty close to the vest, but what I can tell you is that we’re experimenting in ways to expand our platform beyond simply connecting transportation providers to riders. As our CEO Travis once said, “once you’re able to consistently deliver cars in five minutes, there’s a lot more you can also deliver in 5 minutes.”

We’re still very much laser focused on ride-sharing and innovating on how to most efficiently move people around cities, but we’re also spending a lot of time look at things like UberEATS and our platform for merchants: UberRUSH. We’re always looking for ways to make Uber Partners as much money as possible, which means that during periods when demand for trips is low, you’ve got to ask yourself: what if we moved other things around a city instead? How else could we use the Uber platform to make life better and give people more of their time back?

INTERESTED TO LEARN MORE?

OPEX & Process Transformation Week

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• Adapt OpEx to the virtual workplace and mobile connectivity

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