Fleet Manage

A software and hardware product that helps enterprises and institutions to carry out vehicle scheduling and driver management

Role

Product Owner

Work Content

I was the sole product owner after version 2.x of the product, establishing iteration rules and cadence, as well as being responsible for hardware design and optimization

Duration

Aug 2020 - Dec 2020 (5 months)

Skills

Designing product roadmaps, requirements analysis, UI and experience design and more

INTRODUCTION

Reduce costs and increase efficiency

Background

Managing vehicles and personnel has been a persistent problem in China's largest electricity service provider, the State Grid. On the one hand, there are many vehicles to be managed at different levels of the company due to the many operations and maintenance tasks, and on the other hand, there are many drivers to be dispatched according to route scheduling due to the many scenarios where vehicles are needed. In the past, this part of the work was managed by just a few dispatchers, but with the increase in business and to-do items, it was not enough to rely on just a few people.

At the beginning of the product definition, we wanted to create a new fleet management system, starting from managing vehicle keys and gradually managing people from vehicles. However, due to the actual progress and business reasons, in the previous version 1.x design this product was more like a customized product for different provincial and municipal state grid companies, which could not meet our expectation of the product, but also seemed difficult for users to get started with this product.

My Role

This company is undoubtedly a startup, how can I coordinate the work of my colleagues from requirements, R&D, design, testing to sales in the position of product manager, so that each colleague not only has confidence in the product, but is willing to believe that the product can really create more value for the company or for the customer?

QUESTION

What is the truth about this product?

For traditional enterprises and institutions, information technology systems are not developed, and do not use simple and powerful existing systems for use, so the audience customers of the product will naturally have a sense of distrust of unfamiliar products.

For the management of vehicles, there is a very large gray area relying on specific personnel to manage, and the use of information systems is undoubtedly in touch with the vested interests of this part of the population, so the promotion of the product will naturally face greater resistance.

For the company I worked for, there was no prior experience in product design, and all that experience relied entirely on meeting specific customer needs for projects, so the previous versions had hardly met any customer needs and had not been recognized or well received, so the team members did not think they were doing the right and meaningful thing.

So I not only need to complete the product design and optimization, but also need to guide product assistants to find the mission of product work and help them to reshape the value of product manager.

IMPACT

"We found the meaning of work!"

How do I help my requirement, design, testing and R&D colleagues to find the meaning of their work in this team of nearly 20 people? Not only do we need to convince them that the product they are working on has been well received by customers and they are willing to pay for subsequent products, but we also need to establish a rhythm of iterations in the team, use agile R&D skills to break down tasks, estimate time reasonably, and review and summarize for each corresponding iteration.

In addition, the ability to learn and adapt quickly is very important. Not only do we need to quickly grasp hardware knowledge that we have rarely covered before, and communicate and coordinate with hardware design vendors to ensure that the final hardware products are designed according to our ideas, but we also need to maintain communication and contact with our customers, by actually visiting customer companies and production sites, and communicating with front-line drivers and dispatchers to ensure that our product designs are not made behind closed doors.