The Telematics division of Verizon had aspirations of launching a rental marketplace for fleet vehicles (think Airbnb for the trucking world).

When our team was tasked with the challenge, the Telematics team had been working on it without UX or Product direction of any kind for roughly six months. Needless to say, we had our work cut out for us. We dug in and started interviewing key users as well as the Telematics team to establish the exact problem to be solved and the first round of user stories.

We quickly found it challenging to navigate the users needs vs. the Telematic team's wants. Each team member had different (and frequently opposing) ideas which were not in line with our users. With another tight deadline right around the corner, we made the distinction between user stories (the experience—what the person using the product wants to be able to do), and product requirements (functionality—what the product should do). We then encouraged the Telematics team to put down their preconceived notions of what the product should be, and instead, use an empathy filter to focus on what the user truly needed.

We reassured them that the MVP would be successful without the kitchen sink and that our rating system would prioritize the subsequent phases of launch. This change of mindset helped get us to a robust, yet simplified set of requirements for MVP within two weeks of taking on the project. 

Throughout the discovery phase, we also assigned homework to the Telematics team to ensure our roadmap remained on schedule. Specifically, we knew it would take time to define the pricing model, identify and complete the list of all vehicle attribute options, and identify fleet owners willing to test our prototype.

Initially, the team wanted the supply (people leasing their vehicles) and demand (people renting vehicles) to be separate systems and interfaces using separate accounts. However, keeping the flows separate didn't solve what we knew the users wanted. We encouraged the design team to build the product for the users by combining the supply and demand flows into one account thereby simplifying the search, rental, and communication flows. This also created the opportunity to broaden the user-base by enabling supply users to easily become demand users and vice versa. It also eliminated excessive time on development since we’d be building one product instead of two.

After we pitched these initial wires and rationale to the Telematics team, they agreed this was the better way to go.

We promptly implemented our test plans including both user testing (validating the need) and usability testing (validating the solution). Success! We uncovered additional concerns and friction points the fleet owners had; primarily the liability of their vehicles and drivers. We were then able to solve for these new problems.

By week thirteen, the design team had completed 300+ user stories, 6 rounds of user testing, 12 iterations of the solution, 50+ pages of product requirements, and a complete, interactive prototype (shown in the video above) with both the supply and demand onboarding and rental flows. The team was proud of the hard work and late nights put into this product!