What happened after the Uber CEO completed 100 rides and deliveries himself

There is a great long read article in the Wall Street Journal today about the Uber CEO completing 100 rides and deliveries on the app. After driving for Uber, he realized what a nightmare it is for drivers and all the hassle and complications Uber creates for them because the app is severely lacking. It astounds me it took this long for these executives to realize just how much is wrong with the driver side of the app.
The Uber CEO buys a secondhand Tesla Model Y and started driving for Uber in San Francisco. The pandemic fueled a huge labor shortage, so suddenly Uber had to stop taking its drivers for granted and actually consider their user experience. Uber began to focus on drivers. The company offered $250 million in driver bonuses.
Uber has three competing objectives which are called the triangle of death: 1) keeping costs low 2) avoiding legal costs 3) attracting driver. You can not do all three things at the same time.
Some of the things the CEO notices is that it is a pain to sign up for Uber. Uber then created a single sign up process for workers for both rides and food. Another thing was that it is confusing to navigate restaurants and figure out where to pick up the food. Another issue was the Uber would match the driver with his next delivery which already en route to a current order, and then the App would start giving direction to the second order instead of finishing the first order. Sometimes the CEO would show up to pick up and order and it was actually two orders. The biggest issue was something called tip baiting where customers bait a driver to take the order with a high tip and then significantly reduce the tip. When Uber took away the ability to reduce tips, the overall customer tips went down. The theory is that you don’t know if you will even get your food or the timeliness of the delivery, so why would you offer a big tip before you even get your food.
On the driving side, Uber drivers were not always able to see the drop off location for customers and the projected pay. Uber was trying to avoid discrimination of passengers and geographical areas. We have some really rough parts of Chicago here and you could see drivers not servicing entire neighborhoods in Chicago.
In conclusion, Uber put the emphasis back on drivers, and Lyft was slow to do this. Uber was able to do much better as far as revenue and stock performance. It just amazes me it took a pandemic and worker shortage for Uber to think about the driver experience and that its app is a nightmare to be a driver on.

Works Cited:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-ceo-started-driving-for-uber-5bef5023?mod=hp_lead_pos7