Every screen served one of two people. The tab bar said so out loud. The cyan and the type held both together.
Renters
Search opened on a stack of actual cars, each a full photo with its price and how far away it was. A Tesla four blocks over, an Audi across town, a pickup for the weekend. Filter by type, features, whatever the trip needed. The map showed the city filling with cars you could drive today.
Owners
my domainThe other side was a business in your pocket. List a car, set your price and availability, watch the dashboard, get paid while it would otherwise sit in a driveway. I owned the owner experience: listing flow, calendar, dashboard, and the engagement loop that kept good hosts responsive and ranked.
Actual 2014 mockups: a booked trip on the owner's dashboard, and the availability question from the listing flow.
Both sides shipped on iOS and Android, in one cyan.
The airport play (SFO)
The best rental car is the one already waiting when you land. I was part of piloting airport pickup and Park & Earn programs at SFO: owners left their cars to earn while they flew, travelers picked them up on arrival. It turned a parking cost into income and put inventory exactly where demand was.
The real SFO mockup: search by category, as low as $25 / day.
Valet handoff (Luxe)
To smooth the physical handoff, we piloted with on-demand valet startups, Luxe among them, so a car could be delivered and returned without two strangers coordinating a meetup. (Luxe has since wound down its valet service.)
The meetup problem in one screen: two strangers, one car, 2014.
Delivery
An owner could drive the car to the renter, including to an airport terminal. Delivery, launched in 2014, is the feature that quietly turned car sharing into something closer to rental you did not have to go pick up.
Choose your first service, 2014: delivery earned the most.
Location sharing: how two strangers find each other
Delivery moved the car toward the renter, and left one question: how do an owner and a renter find each other with one car between them? Location sharing was the owner flow's answer. Share where you are, privately, around pickup and dropoff, then stop. These are the actual 2014 mockups, Dikembe Mutombo included.
The nudge
The booked trip
The intro
The permission ask
Sharing starts
Both sides moving
The handoff
Mobile strategy, Q4 2014 to 2015.
A workflow recommendation for product, design, and eng.
The decks these came from: the mobile strategy that set the 2014 to 2015 roadmap, and a working recommendation on how product, design, and engineering shipped it together.
and then it became Turo.
Months after I moved on to Apple, RelayRides relaunched as Turo, a new name and a new look built around the idea that renting a stranger's car is not a chore, it is part of the trip. The marketplace I helped bring to market on mobile is the one that scaled into that. Same two sides, same idea: your next car is somebody's car, and it is already near you.
your next car is somebody's car.
The tab bar that named the marketplace, its cyan spent.
