Shift plans that stick

Managers could make a good plan. They just couldn't tell if anyone followed it.

Rebalancing means moving vehicles from quiet areas to busy ones, and swapping batteries and pulling broken ones along the way. Managers planned shifts in a web dashboard, operators worked from a mobile app, and everything in between happened over Slack messages. Performance was measured by operators reporting their own counts.

I needed to see how operators decide what to do next, on the street.

I interviewed operations managers remotely across countries and cities of different sizes, then shadowed ground operators on shift in Melbourne and Perth. Watching them juggle a plan against what they found on the ground shaped almost every decision that followed.

A manager assigns a task on the map, and it lands in that operator's list.

Each task says what to do and where: battery swap, pick up or deploy, the vehicle, its battery and the nearest station, plus who assigned it and when. Operators filter by task type, and closed tasks move out of the way. Because assignments are now recorded, managers finally get a real measure of a shift: how many assigned tasks got done.

Two web tools had grown into each other.

Dashboard ran on Angular and handled operations. Tech House was built by the backend team for themselves on React, then gradually handed to ops. That left duplicated data, overlapping features, and developers maintaining two front ends. I audited both, sat with the teams using them to learn why each page existed, and rebuilt the information architecture around what was really different.

We merged onto React with a component library built on Ant Design and adjusted to Neuron's look, so components stayed cheap to build without looking borrowed. The migration finished ahead of schedule, and several tools became simple enough to hand from developers to city teams.