Scaling back on the engineering and product teams was a smart move to cut costs. The promotions in engineering have been based on rollout of new features. No on

Scaling back on the engineering and product teams was a smart move to cut costs. The promotions in engineering have been based on rollout of new features. No one was willing to be a grown up and require the engineering team to fix actual problems with the core product, the app. That is on the VPs. Sure, fixing bugs is not as much fun as building new features but Uber needs to make its core product better. Uber also had the opportunity to use a mapping system like google maps or Tom Tom the way that Lyft has. Instead, they built their own proprietary system at huge expense, refused to scrap it after it became clear it would be advantageous to do so, and have yet to work out the bugs with turn by turn navigation. There are some brilliant people at Uber doing amazing things, there are also a lot of ridiculous side projects with engineering teams devoted to them like the flying car team. It’s unfortunate that Uber laid off so many people. Maybe if upper management had made smarter choices about how they measure and reward success internally prior to this they would not be in the situation they are in.