Automotive Connected Vehicle (IoT)
Driving Strategic Design Success
Role
Senior Manager; Product Design & User Experience
Client & Market
Panasonic; B2B/B2G SaaS for Intelligent Transportation Systems
Duration
Two years scaling from MVP to production across product verticals
Impact Summary
Scaled design vision and strategy, achieving 80+ SUS and 3.5+ CES
Problem
U.S. roadways are becoming increasingly congested and dangerous, driving an urgent need for real-time, innovative traffic solutions.
Objective
Lead the development and scaling of a Connected Vehicle (CV) platform, ensuring that the design provided traffic operators with intuitive, real-time insights to improve decision-making and enhance public safety.
Team Role
Lead a small product design team as the functional department head, collaborating closely with other department heads to strategically execute short and long-term OKRs.
Users
Key users included State Department of Transportation (DOT) traffic operators, technical hardware experts, roadside hardware installers, and operations and maintenance personnel.
Outcome
Scaled the design of the platform and expanded the product’s marketable value, achieving sustained, measurable success in key UX KPIs through remote and in-person user testing (80+ SUS and 3.5+ CES).
Disclaimer In adherence to non-disclosure agreements, this project selectively presents designs and strategies with some purposeful obscurity, prioritizing confidentiality of proprietary information. The following content is my own perspective and does not necessarily reflect the views of Panasonic.
I.
Scaling connected vehicle solutions to solve roadway challenges
United States roadways are increasingly congested and dangerous. In 2021, over 6 million traffic incidents resulted in 38,000 fatalities, with drivers wasting 97 hours annually due to congestion—costing individuals approximately $1,350 each. This growing issue creates an urgent need for smarter, real-time solutions.
Connected Vehicle (CV) technology presents a promising answer by transforming vehicle data into meaningful roadway insights that enable real-time traffic monitoring and management. Key benefits include:
- Provides real-time snapshots of road conditions, identifying potential hazards like icy roads or imminent congestion based on sudden braking patterns.
- Enhances traffic flow and safety by allowing State Departments of Transportation (DOTs) to respond to incidents more effectively.
- Reduces congestion and travel times through quicker, data-driven decision-making.
This project focused on developing and scaling a production-grade CV platform that helps traffic operators leverage connected vehicle data to significantly enhance traffic flow, improve public safety, and contribute to global transportation solutions.
Previous project context
Previously, I had worked as the sole product designer to successfully launch the product into a new market by designing viable MVP, with live product demonstrations, which secured a major contract within 7 months.
II.
Transition to senior design leadership
After the initial MVP launch, I transitioned from an individual contributor to a Senior Manager of Product Design. In this role, I served as both a player-coach—balancing hands-on design contributions (20%) and strategic leadership (80%)—to guide the vision for the CV platform and lead multiple design initiatives while ensuring alignment with broader business objectives.
Key project objectives
- Support platform scalability: Scale the CV platform design to deliver value across multiple product verticals to various user groups.
- Enhance usability and impact: Drive measurable design outcomes that improve system usability, leading to faster decision-making by traffic operators, and aligning with broader safety and efficiency goals.
- Lead design strategy and team growth: Lead the design team to create consistent, scalable solutions through strategic design, fostering a high-performance design culture.
III.
Cultivating a unique design team culture
In our engineering-driven environment, cultivating a distinct design culture was essential. We prioritized creativity, collaboration, and user-centric principles while advocating for UX best practices across the product development lifecycle. Our structure leveraged individual strengths, balancing data-driven decisions with creative exploration. I worked to build a culture of open dialogue, constructive feedback, and innovation, ensuring alignment across all teams.
Aligning design work with business objectives through OKRs
To ensure our design efforts aligned with broader business goals, I introduced OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) for both the design team and individual members each quarter. These OKRs were directly traceable to high-level business objectives, which I helped shape alongside senior leadership. This provided clear direction, enabling team members to see how their work contributed to overall product success.
Building career pathways for team success
To support each designer’s growth, I developed a two-track career ladder for both individual contributors and leadership roles. This provided transparency around potential career paths and helped align personal aspirations with team and company goals.
Creating a culture of open communication and growth
In our design team, I prioritized transparent communication and individual growth to foster a high-performing culture. The following initiatives were central to achieving this:
- Radical Candor: Used an approach that combines personal care with direct challenges, fostering open, honest feedback across the team.
- 1:1 Meetings: Regular open sessions ensured alignment with OKRs while discussing career growth, aspirations, and challenges.
IV.
Improving team efficiency and cross-functional alignment
Problem: As the product matured, maintaining efficient collaboration and cohesive alignment across cross-functional teams became a growing challenge. Disjointed processes and inconsistent communication hampered productivity and slowed down progress, especially across Design, Product, and Development teams.
- Inefficiency in collaboration due to inadequate systems for prioritizing discussions and adjustments before sprint commitments.
- Lack of consistent communication between Product, Design, and Development, leading to delays and misalignment.
Challenges:
Goal: Establish structured, proactive methods to foster better communication, increase sprint velocity, and improve alignment across cross-functional teams, ensuring timely, efficient progress from design to development.
V.
Streamlining team dynamics with product huddles and agile practices
With the sudden shift to a 100% remote environment due to COVID-19, existing disjointed processes became even more challenging. There was already confusion about what was being built, when, and why, but remote work amplified these issues, making effective collaboration harder. We needed a new approach to not only bring design, engineering, and product teams together for alignment but also to enhance workflow efficiency and team velocity despite the challenges of this new remote reality.
Dual-track agile for improved planning and execution
Initially, all work—including design and development—were essentially planned together, leading to a reactive workflow that constrained the design process. Tasks were executed too close together, leaving minimal time for planning, iteration, and user testing.
- Positioning design work 2-3 sprints ahead of development, allowing space to explore, iterate, and validate before engineering execution.
- Create earlier opportunities for collaboration with developers during solution engineering discussions, ensuring clarity and alignment before tasks were sized and moved into development.
I advocated for formalizing dual-track agile to enable a proactive approach in order to:
This restructuring established a clearer, more predictable workflow and increased the overall quality of our design solutions.
Cultivating 'Product Huddles' for team synergy
To tackle the collaboration issues amplified by the shift to remote work, I launched Product Huddles. Similar to a 'Design Crit,' these structured, interactive meetings brought together design, product, engineering, user research, and data science teams to align around key initiatives.
- Structured Discussions for Alignment: Each huddle centered on features and epics being developed, as well as the insights from user research or user testing sessions that informed our design decisions.
- Refining the Process for Greater Impact: Feedback-led iterations helped evolve the huddles into a critical alignment tool, driving consistent improvements in productivity and alignment, as shown by satisfaction survey results.
Interactive spaces for real-time engagement
Led by designers and approved by product owners, each huddle involved workflow updates and interactive activities, including live sticky notes, comments, and feedback sessions. These meetings fostered an inclusive environment, improving alignment towards a common goal. These huddles also connected cross-functional team members as directions and dependencies emerged, such as a data engineer to front-end engineer.
Huddle boards could include: key research insights, design workflows/logic, user testing results, product briefs, data science models used, etc.
'Tagging,' as I called it, was encouraged in order to share any additional rationale, or points-of-interest, for why something is the way it is.
While reviewing the designs, it's important that we're all on the same page about what we're building, why we need it, and who's doing what next.
Result: Increased alignment and sprint velocity
The use of dual-track agile and product huddles brought much-needed clarity and efficiency to our workflows, directly resulting in:
- Boosted productivity and sprint velocity by 25%: Allowed the team to deliver features faster and iterate more effectively, ultimately meeting tight deadlines with improved quality.
- Cross-functional alignment: Enhanced alignment across design, product, engineering, reserach, and data science teams, supporting the platform’s scalability and ensuring consistent value delivery across different user groups.
VI.
Scaling design strategy amid ambiguity
While fostering a strong design culture and building effective product huddles, I faced the challenge of scaling our strategic design efforts across multiple product verticals—all while keeping up with the rapid pace of development. Managing these intertwined dynamics required effective planning, collaboration, and constant adaptation.
- Balancing Consistency and Flexibility: Maintaining a cohesive design strategy while adapting to the unique requirements of each product.
- Orchestrating Cross-Functional Collaboration: Managing product huddles, user testing, and backlog planning in sync with leads from product and engineering to ensure effective delivery timelines.
- Hitting Strategic Goals: Ensuring our design process contributed to achieving quarterly OKRs while delivering high-quality, user-centered solutions.
Challenges:
Goal: Develop and refine a design strategy that allowed for flexible yet consistent solutions across multiple verticals, ensured alignment through every sprint, and demonstrated measurable impact on usability, helping us achieve both short-term OKRs and long-term strategic goals.
VII.
Systematically quantifying design success
To ensure we were delivering impactful designs, we established a close partnership with user researchers and product owners. We used a range of methods to gather both qualitative and quantitative data from internal and external user groups. One of my main contributions was the introduction of design KPIs into our testing protocols. This allowed us to measure not just whether a design was aesthetically pleasing, but whether it also fulfilled key business objectives and user needs.
To bring a systematic approach to this, I developed a comprehensive framework rooted in the 'jobs-to-be-done' philosophy. This helped us move towards a more data-driven design practice, giving us quantifiable metrics to understand how our design choices directly affected both user experience and the overall value proposition of each product.
Building a design KPI framework for moderated testing
To systematically quantify our design effectiveness, I established a framework for integrating quantifiable KPIs into our moderated testing sessions. This approach ensured consistent, trackable metrics each month. We focused on CES, SUS, and CSAT, each tailored to different aspects of the user experience:
- CES (Customer Effort Score) - Measured from the product to feature level, this metric helped track user effort over time for specific tasks or epics. Ex. How is the CES score changing for an operator to 'Find and understand a single event-of-interest'
- SUS (System Usability Survey) - Used at the end of prototyping sessions, it assessed the usability of systems comprising multiple features and workflows.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) - Exclusively measured at the product level, providing insights into overall user satisfaction.
RTS: Bridging Hardware and Connectivity
Cirrus Roadside Traffic Solutions (RTS) is key to making roads 'connected.' It handles the deployment and upkeep of hardware that allows cars with CV/V2X technology to communicate. This product is quite complex, catering to both internal and external users. Given its technical nature, the project was led by a Senior Product Designer, ensuring the design met the diverse needs and maintained the goal of improving road safety and connectivity.
The RTS application had a large focus on data visualizations and parameters. Because of this, adjustable panel space was allocated around a medium-sized map area.
Tab instances allow quick access to different geographic areas or deployments, where data visualizations will update accordingly.
A quick preview of a device is shown with a prioritized list of criteria for quickly understanding the issue, before diving into more in-depth troubleshooting data.
Some actions to remotely manage operations can be quickly taken on one, or many, devices
Panels can be rearranged and combined for different workstation setups and preferences.
RTS Metrics: Consistently strong, less variance
In collaboration with user research, we regularly collected feedback and metrics from both internal, and external, users in technical roles, well-versed in CV technology. The key takeaway from this data was that our KPIs consistently measured well, often scoring above average, indicating the strong performance and impact of the RTS product.
These charts are approximations simply meant to convey how design success was tracked and measured
SUS was generally high above the de facto 'Good' standard of 67
CES gradually increased at the product level
CES was used often for keep track of our epics, as our session focus and content varied month-to-month
SUS scores were always higher for our internal group, which is where some bias could exist
Similar to SUS, CES would average slightly higher internally
Traffic Management: Enhancing Decision-Making with CV/V2X Data
Cirrus Traffic Management utilized CV/V2X data to provide state DOT traffic operators with accurate, real-time insights, aiding faster decision-making for roadway incidents. Led by a junior/mid-level Product Designer, the product, while slightly less complex than RTS, presented many unique challenges. It catered to external users, mainly traffic operation professionals, who were actively involved in user sessions to ensure the product effectively met their needs.
Traffic Management was much more map-centric, with adjustble panel space only on one side. This is because of the amount of various roadway events that would be visualized together and less priority on viewing data and metrics.
Map selections would show existing traveller alerts and a timeline of relevant event activity
Additional notes could be input manually
With many kinds of events on the map, multi-select could quickly grab and show all active events in an area
TM Metrics: More variance, still positive
User testing for Traffic Management, focusing solely on external traffic operators, revealed more volatile feedback. Challenges in deriving clear insights, potentially due to the small sample size, led to varied scores. Despite this variability, the product generally trended towards positive evaluations over time, indicating its utility in real-world traffic management scenarios.
These charts are approximations simply meant to convey how design success was tracked and measured
SUS scores started lower, but grew over time with adjustments
CES followed the same pattern
TM also used the epic tracking framework with CES
VIII.
Cirrus Design System: Shaping a new design direction
The Cirrus Design System marked a significant departure from Panasonic's traditional design approach. Initially conceptualized during the launch phase, it blossomed into a comprehensive system with reusable components and a unified visual language. My advocacy highlighted its strategic importance in adoption, promising future ROI and a fresh user experience in return for engineering bandwidth.
Opting for a technical, dark-themed aesthetic, we aligned the visual design with Cirrus' innovative identity. This new direction also influenced our color palette choices, ensuring each hue contributed to a consistent, meaningful narrative across the platform, setting a precedent for future Panasonic desktop software design. Internal, and external, surveys and feedback were extremely positive in terms of visual aesthetic and structure.
Design system adoption challenges
At the time, we used Sketch, which was the go-to tool for designing UI (at least in the US). InVision was also a core tool in our workflow, used to handle design approvals, prototyping, huddles and design collaboration, and design system integration into Storybook.
The challenge was to trying to find an acceptable time allocation each sprint to build, and then implement it knowing that it would lower product velocity initially. My approach in trying to push this forward was to frame the initiative as an investment that has a clear ROI to the business once it reaches a certain state of maturity.
IX.
Leading Cirrus creative direction at
CES 2020
In the second half of 2019, I got the opportunity to lead the creative direction for Panasonic's Cirrus showcase at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES is the largest, most influencial tech event in the world for showcasing groundbreaking technologies and innovations.
I worked with an external marketing/creative agency to develop the concept, story, and creative assets 4-5 months prior to the event. The idea was to create an immersive experience that put audience members inside a traffic operations center to see first-hand how V2X technlogy and the Cirrus platform could be used to transform modern traffic operations.
I worked closely with production crews and stage actors throughout pre-production to prepare the event and direct the ~15 minute demonstrations, totaling around 60 over three days. It was an incredible experience. I learned so much about the production world and enjoyed showing and discussing all of the Cirrus team's relentless work alongside some of my colleagues.
Cirrus by Panasonic won CES 2020 Innovation Awards Honoree Recognition in the Vehicle Intelligence & Transportation category and also received widespread global attention and publicity during the event.
X.
Conclusion & Impact
The product design objective for Cirrus by Panasonic was to craft and execute a product design strategy, aimed at generating consistent, scalable, value-driven solutions, underlining cross-functional collaboration, design operations, and overall design success. While, this time of the project is focused on a management and leadership perspective, it builds off of a product design direction and vision I began cultivating early on in the project, which is covered in the following section - V2X Ecosystem Launch.
Through regular strategic planning, effective communication, and collaborative team dynamics the design team played an instrumental role in developing and executing wholistic design solutions which aligned with both business requirements and user needs and insights. Design KPIs measured over time suggest that design quality and execution was top-notch and Jira burndown charts point to a high-degree of efficiency being maintained.
While the ultimate aim was to drastically reduce traffic congestions and improve roadway safety for millions of drivers on public U.S. roadways, this is tied to platform adoption and deployment scale - which time will only tell.
XI.
Retrospective
My time working on the Cirrus project in a management role was as rewarding as it was challenging. I got the chance to learn from many of my more experienced peers how to be successful leader and manager. I experienced many new firsts in my career and learned many new skills and metholodologies around strategic planning, leadership, and people management.
Looking back at the 4.5 years I spent at Panasonic, I'm grateful I got to work with so many brilliant, hard-working, caring people. Seeing all of our hard work come together over the years, starting from ground zero, was definitely the highlight in my career thus far.
