Product Mindset for Transportation Infrastructure

Transportation as Infrastructure — The Way It Is

I’ve been working in the transportation industry nearly my entire professional career — I started as an intern at a traffic engineering firm in 2000 and have since designed traffic calming treatments for the City of San Francisco, traffic signals and roadway layouts for developers, and effective strategies for investing in infrastructure for various departments of transportation. For as long as I’ve been working in the transportation industry, we have struggled to understand what people and shippers truly need from their transportation infrastructure.

We think of transportation too much as infrastructure and not enough as who it’s or what it’s for — moving people and goods. It doesn’t exist for its own benefit; transportation exists to enable everything else to happen. It’s a fundamental good, and we always want to know more, learn more about what people need and how to invest to solve those specific problems.

We focus on solving operational and infrastructure problems, whether they meet the needs of our customers or not. Some of the fundamental problems with how we manage transportation include:

Planners hear from too few opinions from too few voices | We rely on periodic, inconsistent relationships with too few people with too narrow of a set of opinions. We rarely go and find a representative group of people and shippers and understand their motivations and needs. We don’t have a way to listen to the voices of the people who need to take a taxicab to the grocery store because there is no healthy food in their neighborhood, the voice of the commuter from another state who sits in traffic when they could be taking the train, the voice of the truck driver traveling across the country who has no safe place to park to sleep in a safe place.

We understand commute patterns and commodity flows but not why people move the way they do.

Studies are uncoordinated through space, time, and modal choice | There are many, well-defined processes for planning and decision-making in transportation. We produce federally required plans for rail, freight, all transportation, active transportation, safety, transit, and others. We periodically study specific areas (e.g., an interchange or a commuter rail station) or corridors.

We understand information in a slice of time using a specific lens on freight, congestion, active transportation, transit improvements, and other things. But we do not understand the core problems that our customers and communities face and how they change over time.

We aren’t agile enough | We know that things are changing out there and changing quickly. People are living in different locations, they are working in different ways, technologies are evolving, climate is changing, and other risks are emerging. But our processes are slow, infrastructure perspectives need a long clock, and decisions may take a generation to evolve.

We understand we need to move more quickly but we struggle to make that change.

Product Mindset

Embracing a product mindset is a fantastic step toward thinking differently, coordinating better, listening to the customer, and moving in a more agile way. The figure below shows how product teams incorporate continuous discovery, validated learning, and agile delivery to build the right things faster and better. The ability to do this requires a culture that focuses on outcomes over outputs, embraces uncertainty, and is autonomous. Most importantly, the product mindset puts the customer at the center of everything (sorry bridges, pavements, and trains).

When an organization is designed to deliver products, the operating model looks different. It is designed to have teams intentionally connect vision and goals to outcomes. The product teams are dedicated to solving customer problems across silos, influencing decisions, and aligning others with customers’ needs.

Transportation as a Product — The Way it Could Be

Now, let’s imagine that we have a product mindset for transportation. What would change? How would this look? We would:

Define a “transportation product” | This is the first, perhaps most exciting, shift in mindset. Instead of focusing on distinct modes of travel and infrastructure, a transportation product captures how people and goods move. The focus is no longer centered around an interchange in a silo, but on the personas and journeys people and goods make, when and why they use the interchange.

For example, instead of thinking of transportation as a bus route, highway segment, or intersection, a transportation product could be conceived of as a stretch of corridor defined by the areas surrounding a major Interstate/commuter rail/heavy rail corridor (here in Boston this might be I-93 between I-95 and downtown Boston).

Build a team and skill it up | The product team needs a product manager, user experience (UX) designer(s), and data scientist(s).

• The product manager works to understand and prioritize the customer needs throughout the planning and construction lifecycle of the transportation product. The product owner liaises with the different divisions within the DOT and the full array of partners and customers. The transportation product owner understands how to translate agile practices to the slow business of infrastructure, is fluent in transportation data, regularly engages with customers to understand what they need, and understands engineering enough to translate needs to the engineers. The transportation product manager is multimodal fluent and capital and operationally savvy. They understand the levers available across the board to improve people’s lives — whether it be adding a turn lane or taking one away or subsidizing a grocery truck to deliver healthy foods to areas with limited access.
• UX designers focus on empathizing and documenting how people interact with the system. They strive to understand the complete human journey by exploring what creates a fully aligned, context-driven experience for customers. UX designers will research user needs using a variety of tools, including interviews, ride-alongs, market research, voice of the customer surveys, etc. They help to define the problem, explore to uncover solutions, and prototype the solutions to validate them at a fraction of the cost.
• Data scientists find and interpret rich data sources (e.g., socioeconomic, social media posts, speed, crash, images, video feeds, traffic counts, travel patterns by mode, fleet mix, fuel consumption, environmental impacts, public health, access, and others), merge data sources, create visualizations, and use machine learning to build models that aid in creating actionable insight from the data. They know the end-to-end process of data exploration and can present and communicate data insights and findings to a range of team members. They use statistical methods, machine learning algorithms and other tools to analyze data and create predictive models. Some also build data products, recommendation engines, chatbots and other technologies for various use cases.

Let the team begin the journey | The product team would dig in and get to know what the customer wants, needs, and why. The product team would focus on the customer and identify their ‘job to be done.’

The team would learn the history, current snapshot, and potential future patterns of how, when, and why people travel, and freight moves.

The team would read all the related public comments, meet the major employers and travel management agencies, set up regular connections with elected officials, divisions within the DOTs, and sister agencies that have influence over how things work for their travelers (i.e., Federal agencies, environmental, public health). The team would review the condition of the bridges, pavements, and railroads, the bottlenecks, the high-crash locations, planned events, and construction calendar for the state, municipalities, and utilities. It would learn about current equity issues and past inequities.

They would understand if the customers who use their product have access to food and medical facilities, access to jobs that fit their education or access to education that will get them the job, access to a car, access to EV charging stations, and other amenities.

The team would then identify gaps in information and establish ways of collecting, refreshing, and governing data. The team would influence the different modal divisions, capital plans, regional plans, citywide plans, and area plans to reflect the needs of their customers.

A Product Mindset for Fixes that Matter

A product mindset will enable DOTs to improve safety, mobility, and accessibility of our system users because we’ll have a much better understanding of what they really need. Instead of a once in a generation look at what needs to happen, DOTs will be equipped to respond quickly with fixes that matter.

Here at Slalom, we bring the best of modern tools, like the product mindset, to our clients, creating visions for the future that are truly transformative.

In my next blog post, I’ll be talking about how to use modern techniques to engage with transportation customers.

At Slalom, we work with transportation agencies to transform how they deliver services. We took that thinking, coupled it with our expertise in product mindset, and re-imagined how we could connect with the users of our transportation system and how we could deliver services to them. To learn more, talk to one of our experts today.