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Uber Carshare is transforming the rental car space with peer-to-peer car rental, making it easy for users to rent privately owned vehicles. After the original company, Car Next Door, saw success in their home turf of Australia, they were acquired by Uber and moved into their next phase of expansion across the globe.
Uber Carshare soon realized that their copy management process was slowing them down, and wasn’t scaling. Even minor copy updates required creating an engineering ticket, carving out space in the backlog, finding an engineer to pick it up, scoping, and running a full review. This arduous process made updates infrequent, and non-urgent requests all but impossible. “Any content updates had to be tied to a product release,” explains Ailie, content design lead. “If it wasn’t linked to an objective, any copy update tickets would move right to the bottom of the backlog.”
Moreover, with expansion into new markets like the US and Canada, the challenges multiplied. The website content, initially designed for Australia, needed to be localized and adapted for new markets.
“We knew that at least 30% of our content would be different for the US and Canada, compared to Australia, and that we needed to translate our app, website and member site. Needless to say, it was an XL task!”
The product copy review process became a labyrinth of reviews and rounds of feedback, resulting in hours of rework for every frontend engineer before any release. Uber Carshare was in need of a solution to reinvent their copy workflows and expand to new markets quickly and safely.
Since Uber Carshare started using Ditto, they have transformed their product copy processes. In a matter of months, the content design team of four was able to launch content in 2 new global markets, across 3 unique channels, all at the same time. This involved localizing spelling and key terms in each market, as well as displaying variable product details based on that market’s offerings and pricing.
How’d the team do it, you might ask? Content designers leveraged the Ditto component library for reusable content, then heavily used variants for the changing product offerings in each market. All the while, Ditto tags helped audit and track reusable content pieces.
“Ditto Variants are very helpful for expanding into new markets, because localizing content is just a matter of going to the variants tab and updating the string, so the content will change based on your URL. We automated everything. It's great time savings now that we are in multiple countries, and as we expand to more countries as well.” — Harsh Sagar, Engineer
While the content design team was systemizing the copy in Ditto, developers plugged into the Ditto CLI to devise an entirely new product copy review and release process. Instead of individual engineers manually copying and pasting content changes, then opening individual PRs, they use Ditto’s CLI to automatically run a script daily. This allows them to check for copy changes and open 1 consolidated PR every single day — without any manual work from an engineer. Once an automated trigger gets sent to the content writing team to review, the engineering team can automatically merge copy updates to production.
By putting Ditto to work across the content writing and development teams, Uber Carshare was able to unlock some impressive business results: both in the efficiency of their teams, and in the quality of the product copy they were putting out there.
Efficiency
Ditto made it possible for the Uber Carshare content design team to launch in two new markets with their same lean team, which was a huge efficiency unlock in itself.
Ditto helped the engineering team work smarter, too. By plugging into the CLI, the development team was able to prioritize copy changes daily, automatically — and eliminate hours of manual engineering work. Previously, one-off copy updates took 2-3 days to approve, no matter the size of the change. Now, with a single automated PR, the team saves weeks of review cycles on every project.
“Ditto saved us a lot of time,” says Harsh Sagar, engineer. “Once we had Ditto set up, it was just a matter of reviewing the strings and merging it, because all the changes are automatically there.”
Ditto didn’t just make the team work faster, it also made the quality of their work better. Before Ditto, it took an average of 10 days for copy-related bugs to get fixed. With Ditto, it now takes just 1-3 days.
Collaboration
Ditto made collaboration second nature for teams that had never had a way to work together before. The process that engineers built for automated copy updates, coupled with human-led review checkpoints with content designers, instilled confidence in the quality and predictability of each release.
Content improvements and iteration can happen at a rate the Uber Carshare team has never seen before. By building an automated workflow that connects across teams, they can prioritize, review, and merge copy changes every single day. And even though the team was shipping updates at a pace they’d never seen before, their workflow helped them remain confident that everything they shipped met their copy standards.
Ailie McAleenon, Content Design Lead at Uber Carshare, expressed the transformative impact of Ditto, stating, "Today, our content design team has direct access to manage over 90% of our external content, which is insane to think that we could go from 0% to 90% in one year, with Ditto."
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By putting Ditto to use across the content design and development teams, Uber Carshare was able to work quickly, nimbly, and collaboratively, all while maintaining their rigorous quality standards.
In the words of Ailie McAleenon, Content Design Lead at Uber Carshare, "If you want to maintain control over your content and also be able to give more people access to your content and update as needed, you need Ditto."
