The project
Great product management means pursuing your product’s next big opportunity – and perfecting the experience your customers have today.
Our work with Digital Charging Solutions, an electric vehicle charging startup created from within BMW, sees us managing a complex design system across their suite of ChargeNow branded digital products. As a rapidly growing company there are also new ideas aimed at different customers that need testing and validating.
With a consumer facing product already in development, DCS wanted to expand on a business to business offering.
With a basic database already in use within the organisation, demand was heavy for a tool with the unique features required by various different types of Fleet Manager.
However, there were lots of questions to answer:
- What are the different use cases for fleet management?
- What are the complexities in managing a fleet of cars vs just one?
- How can we draw from existing fleet management products that provide fuel cards?
- Who are the existing competitors and how can the service be improved?
- What are the unique requirements of a driver in the fleet (i.e. charging vehicles at home and billing their company), and what will make the strongest experience for them?
Product Sprint
Our take on the classic design sprint – get your product off to a flying start ✈️
Competitor analysis
We prepared for the design sprint with a short analysis phase focusing on the current marketplace – comparing tools that provided for our target market.
We built a table to compare their product’s features, their UI examples, and the types of copy they were using to market the solution.
Our research was coupled with an analysis of the industry to help us evaluate the product against three criteria – Desirability, Feasibility and Viability.
The sprint
We teamed up with DCS and a partner to run a three day design sprint near their offices in Munich.
By completely blocking out every participant’s calendar for this exercise, we were able to produce results that would have taken months more to develop alongside our normal schedules.
The result
The end of the sprint saw us present our progress to the CEO to secure investment for building the MVP. Work then went into fully scoping the tool, prototyping and pushing into production. Extending the central ChargeNow design system we created a UI kit that differentiated the tool for the new user persona.
