Building a Team at Scoot

Product

A mobile and web app that connected to electric vehicles to help technicians with repairs and maintenenance.

Problem

The existing tooling for troubleshooting vehicle issues were very poor, and web-only. Scoot was ready to invest in a dedicated team for internal tooling to build these tools out, so they hired me to help build out a new team. The main focus was improving tools to locate, charge, and repair it's fleet of shared electric motor scooters, eBikes, and electric kick scooters.

Discovery

We audited the system and did some qualitative research to understand the problem space. My first team member was an engineering manager with a ton of context in Scoot's systems. Together we conducted 45 minute sessions with 19 different users across customer service, fleet and city managers, and field service supervisors. We also shadowed fleet technicians and customer service reps while they performed their daily tasks.

There were some clear patterns.

1. We don’t have enough information on the state of our inventory.
2. GPS location of vehicles is often inaccurate.
3. Many open tickets are inaccurate or have already been resolved.
4. A fleet tech has to look at multiple places to get the information they need. - opportunity
5. Route planning is complicated and time consuming. - opportunity
6. Mechanics take clerical shortcuts to improve efficiency. - opportunity

We learned that although some of the tools were difficult to use, there were no major pain points for customer service reps. They were able to look for riders, help them with payment issues, and occasionally turn on a scooter for them.

Define priorities with key stakeholders.

We held a team kickoff and invited all our key internal users and stakeholders. We explained what we had learned, what the state of our current tools are, and our short and long term roadmap. We collaborated on our roadmap strategy with our stakeholders so everyone had visibility into the timeline and value of our work.

Build Plan

Working closely with my PM and engineering lead, we built out a roadmap and coordinated major releases with other impacted teams. Asana was helpful for coordinating this.

Developing Team Process

I helped shape our process by developing design principles and project scoping templates. I also implemented a weekly shadowing schedule to help our engineers build empathy.

Solution

In a few months we built a react-native app that automated route planning for low charge vehicles, and made it easier to locate vehicles that needed maintenance. We also uplifted the web experience for vehicle management. After that, we started planning out our roadmap to support city expansion, create new automated tasks like picking up and dropping off vehicles, web tools for firmware engineers to better update vehicles, and simplified the process of performing actions on a vehicle. In roughly 6 months we had built a brand new team and processes, and were continually providing value to our direct users.