Car-sharing with 0% Emissions
WeShare was a 100% electric car-sharing service owned by Volkswagen, who later sold the fleet to Miles Mobility. The company operated in two German cities, Berlin and Hamburg. Their goal is that every car is emission-free, shared, and affordable for everyone.
The mission lasted 3 months, from December 2021 to March 2022, to fill the gap of a missing Product Manager. The new hire was scheduled to join in March, and there was a huge opportunity cost to leave the development team without guidance. Additionally, multiple topics needed product discovery.
The CPO (Chief Product Officer) acted as an Interim Senior Product Owner (client’s naming for Product Managers) of the Accounts and Registration Team to help deliver a time-sensitive initiative related to document verification, ensure the clearing of dependencies for other development teams, and secure the team's stability during a transition phase.
However, the mission was accompanied by other unexpected complexities:
During the mission, we have helped the team to finalize the development of the driving license revalidation feature, led them through changes in the team structure and scope of work, coordinated the appraisal of the new SDK of the verification provider, and secured a smooth transition to the new full-time hire.
Each new user needs their driver's license verified before being allowed to use the app and book a car. The client used a 3rd party provider for this. When we joined, the new user registration conversion rate was negatively affected by the declining performance of a 3rd party verification provider. We A/B tested a new solution with the current provider’s SDK before roll-out to active customers and improved the registration conversion rate.
The company was getting ready to kick off a new pilot involving developers from multiple external software development agencies. They were also hiring new team members and restructuring the current teams.
Aside from keeping team morale high, we had to ensure that current topics were moving forward, the external development team was getting onboarded and involved quickly, and at the same time, the new pilot was on track.
We ran and participated in several workshops, which were focused on defining the new scope of work and team restructuring in order to ensure that there was alignment and ownership within the new Pilot project. Through our efforts, we were able to uncover any grey areas or risky assumptions that needed to be addressed. Additionally, we drove further alignment and validation of the business case and provided valuable input in the shaping of initial designs. Our work was instrumental in helping to create a successful foundation for the Pilot project and set the team up for success.
We prepared detailed documentation of the ongoing initiatives for the new hire and improved on the previous documentation. We also spent extra time going over details regarding processes and specifics after the team reorganization ensuring a smooth transition and knowledge transfer to the new Product Owner.
Notable outcomes we've delivered in our three months:
💡 Helped the team get through organizational and scope change and start owning their new mission.
💡 Unblocked other development teams by task re-prioritization.
💡 Ran A/B tests to improve user verification rate.
💡 Successfully onboarded a new PM.
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