Production Line #1: Volt Lines' Q3 2018 Priorities

If you are more comfortable with English, please continue to the EN version.

Hello! I'm Burcu, and I am the Product Manager at Volt Lines. I hope you are having a good week and a good day, and that everything is running smoothly. Let me get straight to it: as the Product and Technology arms of Volt Lines, we thought about how we could share our experiences, what we have learned and our general mood in a way that might be useful to communities in Turkey and around the world, and we decided to write regular blog posts. The first output on the Product side of this series — which, luck permitting, we hope will run for a lifetime — turned out to be a post about the insights, needs and other general things Volt Lines prioritised in Q3 (the third quarter of the year, covering July, August and September). (You can also read the first post from the Technology side, written by Baran, here.)

Let me get straight to it: as the Product and Technology arms of Volt Lines, we thought about how we could share our experiences, what we have learned and our general mood in a way that might be useful to communities in Turkey and around the world, and we decided to write regular blog posts. The first output on the Product side of this series — which, luck permitting, we hope will run for a lifetime — turned out to be a post about the insights, needs and other general things Volt Lines prioritised in Q3 (the third quarter of the year, covering July, August and September). (You can also read the first post from the Technology side, written by Baran, here .)

I hope I have managed to tell the story stripped of the industry jargon the team has got used to. If you feel I have skipped any detail and made it harder to follow, please tell me. If everything is fine so far, let's carry on.

Our priorities on the Product side for the third quarter of the year were shaped by a customer that joined the Volt Lines transportation network towards the end of the second quarter and multiplied our total user count several times over. After scenarios that had never once crossed our minds and a few "how on earth did we pull that off" moments, we could see clearly that:

• To keep the shuttle drivers in our transportation network happy and the data flowing continuously, the driver app's experience has to be very good and its performance has to be high.
• We have to be ready for the near-term goal of a large number of shuttle linesin every business unit.
• To keep increasing efficiency across every process the Operations team runs, on the Product and Technology sides we have to adopt a bottleneck-solving approach.
• For the Operations team, employers, employees, drivers — for every stakeholder — the first day of using Volt Lines shuttles has to go perfectly smoothly.
• We have to have eyes on every action taken in the apps and we have to be transparent with all stakeholders.

Now let me go into a bit of detail.

1. Performance and UX improvements in the driver app.

We learned that drivers were running into an overheating problem with phones that stayed on the map view throughout the shuttle journey and were never taken off the charger. Our flagship driver app heating up phones led drivers to use the app "sparingly" and started causing interruptions in the data flow. We ran tests on this and optimised our real-time location update system , shrank the location data flowing between all the products and built a feature that cachesthe map and does not ask again and again for the route travelled each day (if you think about it, a shuttle follows roughly the same road every morning and every evening). As a result of these three improvements we cut the number of API calls made significantly and noticeably reduced the overheating.

While doing field tests by riding along on real journeys with our middle-aged drivers, we also gained a serious UX insight: one of the drivers could not comfortably read the written messages in the app, so he had used a native Android feature to set the font size for his entire phone to the largest setting (picture here the unhappy buttons and pop-ups blowing apart because of a large font size we had not catered for). We then decided this was an important need for everyone on the move, and increased the text size throughout the app.

That episode taught us well for later scenarios too: in the driver app, we started conveying the information we want to bring to the fore visually rather than in words.

Another improvement we made on the UX side was to stop showing the full list of passengers on the shuttle and to show only the next passenger to get on or off . Our drivers, who had been busy looking at every passenger and making sure they had picked the right person, breathed a sigh of relief too.

2. A large number of shuttle lines in every business unit*.

(*you can think of a business unit as "a unit separating out the districts where business centres are concentrated")

Because our business model is built on the value created by shuttle lines with hours that are as flexible as possible and destinations that vary, for each company in the Volt Lines network, every new customer joining a business unit increases both the number of users in that unit and the number of shuttle lines centred on it at an accelerating rate. As of the day I am writing this, we could see that the number of lines available to users in a single business unit can comfortably pass 100: in other words, a company can have 100 different lines that all its employees can access in the evening. With that in mind, we were relieved to prioritise a core feature that had been sitting in the Backlog for a long time: switching in the evening to a shuttle going somewhere other than home. With this feature — our first step towards being an on-demand network — employees can see in the passenger app every shuttle leaving from around their office, the districts it passes through and its full route; they pick the one they like and get off where they want.

3. A bottleneck-solving approach in operational processes.

This quarter we really got to grips with the operational processes and produced smart, technology-backed solutions for some of the needs. We drew the line like this: let's automate the work that repeats constantly, is error-prone and takes human effort. With that approach we produced something fantastic: a set of home-grown algorithms that allow instant updates for real-time operational changes and that, when routing shuttle lines, pick the most suitable stops for a group of passengers, order those stops correctly and draw the most sensible route .

Creating a new route, adding a new employee to one of the routes or changing an existing employee's route now takes about 30 seconds.

4. Making the first day of using Volt Lines shuttles go perfectly smoothly.

Because the departments running shuttle operations at our customers wanted to know, before joining the Volt Lines network, parameters such as how far employees would have to walk, how long their journeys would take and how much extra distance would be covered compared with the direct home-to-work distance, we built a tool that produces outputs allowing the routes of each line to be examined in detail. And to let employees and drivers know about their routes, their pick-up and drop-off stops and times before day one, we added a feature called "Sneak Peek" to the mobile apps: users can now preview the entire shuttle experience before the first day and, if they wish, give feedback — helping us improve our service quality by changing the things that do not make sense in practice.

5. Having eyes on every action.

After finding ourselves in a few situations that undermined our operational quality and our aim of obtaining meaningful data, we started recording (logging) every detail of every journey. And to make those logs push things in as good a direction as possible, we built a game played among our drivers that is based on using the app. The outputs of that laborious process were satisfying: employers can see the details of every journey their employees make, and we can track any disruption in real time and react quickly.

If you have read this far, you are the best! Thank you for your time and your interest. We plan to make posts like this more frequent over time. I hope you will follow us here or on other social channels, and that you will not keep your thoughts about the post — good or bad — to yourself, but share them with me…