Uber's Uber One cancellation flow required 32 steps across 23 screens. The FTC filed a 44-page complaint detailing how Uber enrolled users without proper consent, buried disclosures in deliberately confusing UI, and built a labyrinth specifically designed to prevent cancellation. This wasn't a design oversight. It was the growth strategy.
The Metric Trap
The churn numbers almost certainly improved. Quarterly KPIs probably looked excellent. An entire product team designed, reviewed, and shipped a cancellation flow that takes longer to complete than most Uber rides -- because the metric they optimized for was churn reduction, and nobody asked how they were reducing it.
This is what organizational metric fixation produces. Not a rogue PM. Not a single bad decision. A systematic outcome of incentive design: when you reward churn reduction without constraining the method, you get 23 screens of friction dressed up as "confirmation steps."
The Actual Cost
The FTC complaint. Class-action lawsuits. Executive hours burned on damage control. Regulatory scrutiny that now extends beyond subscriptions into Uber's broader product flows. The short-term churn improvement purchased long-term legal exposure and brand erosion at a ratio that no reasonable cost-benefit analysis would endorse.
32 steps. 23 screens. Someone designed each one. Someone in product approved each one. Someone in legal reviewed each one. The failure is structural -- an organization that lacked a single checkpoint asking whether the growth was real or coerced.
Growth that erodes trust isn't growth. It's debt with compounding interest. And 44 pages of federal complaint is the invoice.
The Diagnostic
Try canceling your own product's subscription. Not through internal tools. The same flow your most frustrated user encounters.
Count the steps. Read the copy. Note where the language turns evasive -- where "cancel" becomes "pause" becomes "are you sure" becomes "here's what you'll lose."
If your cancellation flow embarrasses you, you already have your next sprint's priority. If it doesn't embarrass you, look harder.