AvantGo

Alan D. MacCormack; Kerry  Herman

Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2001 (Revised November 2001)

AvantGo

Abstract

Richard Owen, CEO of AvantGo, is preparing for a meeting in which he will set the human resource policy for the firm going forward. It has been three months since the company's IPO, and given the tremendous cramp in hiring over the six months prior to the IPO, he knows that this meeting will set the expectations for the many annual evaluations that will follow. Uppermost in his mind is the decision on whether to implement a "forced-curve" grading scheme, and the implications of this decision on staff perceptions and notification.

Keywords: Initial Public Offering; Management Teams; Selection and Staffing; Retention; Growth and Development Strategy; Performance Evaluation; Technology; Decisions; Information Technology Industry; Service Industry; United States;

Format: Print

19 pages

Find at Harvard

Citation:

MacCormack, Alan D., and Kerry Herman. "AvantGo." Harvard Business School Case 601-095, April 2001. (Revised November 2001.)

This case describes the operations of a fictitious company that processes Cranberries. The case contains data that allows students to calculate the bottleneck stage in production, and to evaluate alternative investment options for increasing cranberry processing capacity.

Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018 (Revised February 2020)

Innovation at Uber: The Launch of Express POOL

Chiara Farronato, Alan MacCormack and Sarah Mehta

Set in March 2018, the case follows ride-sharing company Uber as it develops and launches a new product called Express POOL. This product offers a reduced price to riders willing to carpool, walk a short distance to/from their pick-up and drop-off points, and wait a few minutes before being matched to a driver. Two weeks after the launch of Express POOL in six U.S. cities, Uber’s product managers discover that if riders are made to wait five minutes to be matched to a driver—rather than the standard two minutes—rider cancellation rates increase, but Uber’s costs per ride are reduced. Together with data scientists, engineers, and product operations specialists, the product managers must decide whether to keep rider wait times at two minutes or increase wait times to five minutes in the six newly launched cities. The decision is complicated by the fact that Uber’s data science team normally places a five-week moratorium on changes to any new product, to allow robust data to be collected on its performance. This case is paired with a supplementary dataset from Uber (HBS No. 619-702). In advance of the class discussion, students can analyze the data and draw their own conclusions about the trade-offs of maintaining the standard wait times or increasing them.

Keywords: Innovation and Management; Innovation Leadership; Innovation Strategy; Technological Innovation; Technology; Mobile Technology; Software; Technology Platform; Decision Making; Technology Industry; California; San Francisco;

Citation:

Farronato, Chiara, Alan MacCormack, and Sarah Mehta. "Innovation at Uber: The Launch of Express POOL." Harvard Business School Case 619-003, October 2018. (Revised February 2020.) View Details

Cite View Details Educators Purchase

Faculty & Research

AvantGo

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author