Prioritize a quarterly roadmap for Reservations

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Uber is a mobility and delivery platform; its products include rides, Uber Eats, grocery and retail delivery, freight, driver and courier tools, and marketplace pricing.

Uber Reservations lets riders schedule trips in advance, a particularly high-stakes use case for airport travelers who need confidence that a ride will arrive on time despite flight schedules, luggage, traffic, driver availability, pricing, and local market variability. In this interview, you are the PM responsible for setting the next-quarter roadmap for Reservations, with a focus on improving the airport travel experience while balancing marketplace reliability, rider trust, driver supply, and business outcomes.

You should assume there are multiple potential initiatives competing for limited engineering, design, data science, operations, and marketplace resources. These may span rider-facing booking flows, driver matching and commitment, airport pickup/dropoff workflows, pricing and incentives, flight-related context, notifications, support tooling, reliability improvements, or market-specific operational changes.

Your task is to describe how you would prioritize the quarterly roadmap and turn that prioritization into an execution plan. The interviewer is looking for how you structure the decision, clarify goals, evaluate trade-offs, sequence work, manage dependencies, define launch readiness, and reduce execution risk—not for a single “correct” list of features.

The experience should consider:

- The primary airport traveler journeys, including booking ahead, pre-trip confidence, pickup/dropoff coordination, delays, cancellations, and support needs.

- How to evaluate competing roadmap options across rider impact, driver experience, marketplace liquidity, reliability, safety, unit economics, and operational complexity.

- Quarter-level sequencing, including what ships first, what requires experimentation, and what may need market-by-market rollout.

- Owners and cross-functional dependencies across product, engineering, design, data science, operations, support, legal/policy, and local airport teams.

- Go/no-go criteria for launching initiatives, including readiness of supply, reliability thresholds, customer support preparedness, and marketplace health.

- Risks such as overpromising availability, driver cancellations, airport congestion, poor ETAs, regulatory or airport-specific constraints, and degraded trust if reservations fail.

- Rollback, mitigation, and communication plans for riders, drivers, support teams, and local operations if launches underperform.

The goal is to demonstrate how you would make a clear, defensible quarterly roadmap decision for Uber Reservations and translate it into an operating plan that improves airport traveler trust while protecting marketplace reliability and business performance.