How to Build the Right Thing
Quick Answer
Building the right product in EV charging software requires going beyond feature requests and user feedback to understand the operational context behind them, because operators often request workarounds to flaws in their current workflow rather than describing what would actually make their work better. eMabler Senior UX Engineer Aleksi Väisänen spent a week embedded at Movel, a Norwegian EV charging operator, observing daily operations from customer onboarding to charger troubleshooting, and discovered pain points the product team had no visibility into from a distance. The key insight is that listening alone yields half the truth; understanding the motivation and context behind how users work is what turns feedback into product decisions that actually solve the right problems.
This article covers each of these points in detail.
One of the most difficult things in SaaS business is figuring out how to build the right thing. If you are already an established SaaS platform with a solid user base it is very easy to think that you and your team knows the best what you should be doing. You get requests from new leads; your service desk receives bug and feature requests, or you have benchmarked your competition on the next cutting-edge features. You are working elbows deep with your product every day, of course you know what you are doing. But do you really?I must admit that we at eMabler have fallen into this way of thinking ourselves at times. I see two reasons for this:The EV charging industry is relatively new and many of our customers entering this field fall into a “feature-trap” without really understanding the operational side of the business and what the competitive advantage they aim at is. So, it is easy to just run your product development sprint by sprint, chasing new leads and trying to beat your competition with new features. Of course, if you are lucky, this approach works great, and you will get everything right the first time, and both your team and your customers are happy. Unfortunately, not always.The second reason is that the so-called migrated customers i.e. those who have been offering EV charging services for a while, have gotten used to the way they operate the EV charging service and assume that is the only right way. So, when we talk with them, they also want to copy the flaws of the system with some minor improvements.
Talk to your users
Prior to the launch of eMabler Connect, I had a great opportunity to spend a week working at Movel’s premises. Movel is an electric vehicle charging operator in Norway who has been scaling their growth by taking eMabler into use already in September 2021. As eMabler and Movel have been collaborating for a long time eMabler wanted to have a deeper knowledge how they operate on day-to-day level and how they use eMabler. This was also a great chance to benchmark Connect before the beta launch and see whether we had built the right things.The week consisted of discussions between different teams and trying to pinpoint pain points in the daily operations. I had the pleasure to see how our users were using eMabler platform to run their business from onboarding new customers to troubleshooting misbehaving chargers. Immediately on my arrival people at Movel presented me their biggest frustrations with the platform. What’s best, most of the things the team was struggling with daily I had no clue of.Listening to the users is very important, but by only listening you only get half of the truth. You need to dig deeper, ask questions and find the motivation behind the reasons your users are working like that. Without proper understanding of the ways of working and having empathy towards your users your solutions for the pain points will most probably be wrong or at least not ideal.
Leave the ego at home
As a designer who is proud of what they produce it can be difficult to listen your users being frustrated on the product you have designed. After having spent countless hours on making everything pixel perfect on the user interface it is difficult to hear that the solution does not indeed work, they way you wanted. Feeling bad about negative feedback is normal and it just means that you care, but it is not a reason to take the feedback personally. Leave the ego at home and embrace the feedback. You have a great chance to now fix the mistakes and make a world-class product. Handling feedback in general is a big part of designer’s work. By learning how to handle feedback, both negative and positive, you’ll become better at what you are doing. Let the users of your platform help you become better.
Gather feedback and deliver
During the week at Movel I was able to make a couple of quick prototypes that would potentially help with some of the pain points. I figured that since I now had access to a valuable feedback-loop I’d better utilize it well. These prototypes later evolved into proper features in Connect that started providing value to our users immediately. A true win-win situation: our users don’t have to be frustrated, and I know as a designer I have done something properly well-functioning which makes our product better.One week is of course too short to fix everything, so the work doesn’t end there. I now had an analysed list of action points to take home from the trip. A concrete list of features and changes which we could then further prioritize on our development queue. And what is the coolest part: we can be quite sure that this list will be useful to our users.I once again want to thank everyone at Movel for taking me in for a week and giving me some of their precious time. Their team is full of very professional people whom I had the pleasure of getting to know throughout the week. For us at eMabler this trip was invaluable and provided us insights on how to continue pushing the boundaries of developing a first-class charge point management system.