Tier to Became One of the Three Winners of the London Tender with the Support of Product People

The client: Tier

The Europe's leading shared micro-mobility provider

TIER Mobility is a shared micro-mobility provider, with a mission to Change Mobility for Good. They have a range of light electric vehicles, from e-scooters to e-bikes and e-mopeds, powered by a proprietary Energy Network. TIER reached 1 Million rides six months after launch, claiming this supercharged growth "faster than any E-Scooter company."

🦄TIER Mobility is a unicorn, having raised $447.9M in funding over six rounds, with the latest financing raised on June 2021.

Since October 2018, the Berlin-based app has served over 180 cities in 20 countries, most in Europe and the UAE, and Qatar. It is renowned for its pioneering approach to safety, its ability to ensure orderly parking, and its unrivalled sustainability approaches.

The mission: Interim Product Managers

We had 2 different missions: 

  • To set up the Product to Tackle Compliance and Win the London Tender.
  • Interim Data Product Manager.

How We Helped

Mission 1: Set up the Product to Tackle Compliance. Win the London Tender.

This mission lasted from November 2020 through February 2021. It was renewed as a new mission in March 2021. For a mobility provider to win the market they need to:

  • Win the riders
  • Increase operational efficiency
  • Convince the regulators - regulatory requirements vary from city to city, change over relatively short periods of time, and depend on individual tender negotiations. We were called to help with this!
The new City Compliance product team we've helped set up came to maintain a good relationship with regulators while caring for the riders and maximizing operational efficiency.

In Paris, riders cannot park anywhere but only in areas designated by the city. But no one wants scooters piled up near Notre Dame. So the next logical request Paris made was to limit the number of scooters allowed to park in one designated area.

As Interim Product Managers in this team, we have helped validate, build and launch dynamic parking capacities and ensured automatic compliance: before that, employees needed to drive to these locations and manually rebalance the scooters in a very short time.

Riders bought into the change as they understood that everyone needed to do their part to keep the streets uncluttered by scooters.

Mission 2: Interim Data Product Manager

This mission lasted from March 2021 until October 2021, finishing when a full-time employee joined to take over this role.

Regulators require micro-mobility providers to share data under two standards:

  • MDS (Mobility Data Specification)
  • GBFS (General Bikeshare Feed Specification)

Both are to be delivered through an API (Application Programming Interface). Without this mandatory compliance, they won't be allowed to operate in certain cities.

As Interim Data Product Managers, we prioritized Data Sharing Compliance across 100+ cities on two continents. We all drove infrastructure planning and regulation enforcement for the benefit of riders and regulators.

For example, we helped riders find nearby scooters and e-bikes by integrating with Google Maps.

Delivered Outcomes

💡 Tier was selected as one of the three micro-mobility providers in London alongside Dott and Lime, having met rigorous and competitive tender requirements set by Transport for London (TfL).
💡 Set up a new Product Pillar and onboarded the first Senior Product Manager, who was able to ramp up faster owing to Mirela's pre-work in setting up the team processes, and stakeholder management structures.
💡 Tier now complies with MDS 2.1 (Mobility Data Specification) and GBFS (General Bikeshare Feed Specification) mobility data sharing standards across multiple markets within Europe and the Middle East.

In the Client's Own Words

Space Crew of this Mission

VP/Director/Head of Product
Product Management Consultant
Associate Management Consultant

For Clients: When to Hire Us

You can hire us as an Interim/Freelance Product Manager or Product Owner

It takes, on average, three to nine months to find the right Product Manager to hire as a full-time employee. In the meantime, someone needs to fill in the void: drive cross-functional initiatives, decide what is worth building, and help the development team deliver the best outcomes.
If you're looking for a great Product Manager / Product Owner to join your team ASAP, Product People is a good plug-and-play solution to bridge the gap.