Talking Strava / How our teams came together for a successful launch
Strava is a new integration we recently launched that brings the best of social networking and the quantified self movement to the Peloton community. Launching the Strava integration was a group effort that required the coordination of three teams: developers, product and design. We took some time to talk to our team to understand the collaborative effort that brought this project to life.
Why is the new Strava integration such an exciting launch?
Dave, Product Manager: The launch of our Strava integration is a step toward holistic fitness tracking for our users. Since Peloton riders are active beyond the bike (they are runners, outdoor cyclists, etc), we are excited to give them a way to track all of their fitness activities in one place.
How are the riders able to use this? What are the specific features?
Dave: Peloton riders can now use Strava to track and measure their progress and ride results. This creates a fun new way to see and share the history of your workouts, further enhancing the Peloton riding experience.
A really cool feature that was actually Ben’s idea was the ability to auto-post any future rides to Strava. So, rather than having to worry about sharing to Strava at the end of your ride, there’s a setting that you can activate that will automatically share your ride to Strava.
How will this impact Peloton riders?
Dave: I think for existing Strava users they’re going to be really excited to have this data be in sync with their fitness activities. For users who don’t know what Strava is, this is going to really turn them onto a really exciting fitness platform. This is just another reason to get out there and be active!
What was the interaction like between each team for this feature to come alive?
Swarna, Software Engineer: The communication between the product, dev and design is crucial in all projects. The communication is very effective when product and design understand the technical challenges involved and then dev understands the actual rationale behind the requirement.
The coordination between design, product and Android was clear and that helped us to create smooth animations during the Strava upload. For example, a 45 minute Peloton ride takes approximately nine seconds to upload. It would be a bad experience for the user if Android’s default infinite loading bar ran during the upload.
Eric, our multimedia creative director, came up with a loading progress bar that provides the status for the upload. This was challenging due to Android’s limitations. Android only knows if the upload is completed successfully or not. By setting up a max time limit and by animating the progress status, we were able to overcome this obstacle and create a pleasing user experience.
What was the most exciting part about this project from your personal perspective?
Dave: For me, it was taking my first ride that I could share to Strava. Doing pre-launch testing and being able to see what it looked like and having people like it on Strava. That was cool and exciting.This is Strava’s first experience in the indoor cycling market so having them be just as pumped up about this project was a huge bonus.
Ben, Software Engineer Manager: The most exciting part about this is that I’ve never used Strava before. Dave got me into Strava and it’s something that I’ll be able to use myself, so that’s pretty awesome!
Want to learn more on our Strava launch? Click here.
