The System Behind the Ride

Connecting and Verifying 500+ Scooters

Telemetry as Continuous User Research

Building Operational Awareness

Supporting Fleet Operations in the Field

Designing a Reliable Rider Experience

Municipal Compliance Through Transprency

Modeling Fleet Economics

Outcomes

Reflection

Sun Scooter was an early-stage micromobility startup operating at the intersection of mobile applications, connected IoT hardware, and municipal infrastructure. As Co-Founder and Head of Product, I led product strategy and research across rider experiences, fleet operations, telemetry systems, deployment workflows, and city-facing compliance platforms.

Although the rider experience appeared straightforward, every interaction depended on a distributed system spanning mobile applications, cloud services, connected scooters, field operations, and municipal infrastructure. Rider requests flowed through multiple hardware and software components, while scooters continuously reported location, battery status, ride activity, and diagnostic information back to the platform.

Designing a reliable rider experience required designing the entire system behind it. Rider applications, internal operations tools, telemetry systems, and city platforms were developed as an integrated product ecosystem, where reliability, operational efficiency, and regulatory compliance all shaped the user experience.

Before riders could unlock a scooter, every vehicle needed to be connected, configured, validated, and integrated into the broader platform.

As the fleet expanded, I oversaw the onboarding and verification of more than 650 connected scooters. Each vehicle was tested to ensure reliable server communication, accurate telemetry reporting, consistent lock and unlock behavior, and seamless integration with the rider application.

Validation extended beyond hardware functionality. Every scooter functioned as a fully integrated system node, allowing us to identify telemetry inconsistencies, delayed state updates, connectivity issues, and communication failures before they reached riders.

The scooter itself was also part of the user experience. Riders needed to quickly identify vehicles, locate QR codes, understand safety requirements, and recognize the service in the field. I contributed to the design and deployment of vehicle branding, instructional decals, and visual systems that connected the physical fleet to the broader digital experience.

Treating deployment as a systems-level validation process established a reliable foundation for fleet operations, rider experiences, and future growth.

A core part of my role was treating scooter telemetry as a continuous source of UX research. Each scooter streamed data describing location, battery state, connectivity, lock status, ride activity, and hardware events, which I analyzed using MATLAB pipelines across the fleet.

Telemetry made rider and system failures visible at scale. By examining data over time and across locations, I identified unlock failure modes, battery-related ride drop-offs, latency between app commands and hardware responses, and geographic clusters of theft or hardware failure. Many of these patterns rarely surfaced through user reports alone, yet had an immediate impact on rider trust, fleet availability, and operational cost.

These insights informed product decisions ranging from rider feedback and confirmation states to maintenance prioritization and fleet rebalancing. Rather than treating telemetry as an operational metric, I used it as behavioral evidence to translate hardware signals, latency patterns, and system failures into actionable product decisions.

Keeping the rider experience reliable at scale required operational visibility across the entire fleet. I worked closely with mechanics and field operators to design real-time fleet monitoring tools that translated telemetry into actionable operational insight.

Field teams needed immediate awareness of vehicle availability, battery health, maintenance status, connectivity issues, and emerging incidents across the city. Rather than investigating individual scooters one at a time, operators needed a system-level view that highlighted where attention was needed most.

The fleet operations map transformed thousands of telemetry events into a spatial view of fleet health, enabling operators to prioritize maintenance, respond to issues more quickly, and coordinate field activity more effectively. By making fleet conditions visible in real time, the platform helped teams resolve operational issues before they became rider-facing failures.

Operational visibility only created value if field teams could act on it. I designed an internal mobile application that translated fleet telemetry into actionable field workflows, enabling mechanics and operators to locate scooters, diagnose issues, complete repairs, and rebalance fleet availability efficiently.

The rider experience extended beyond finding and unlocking a scooter. Every stage of the journey, from discovery and ride initiation to parking and trip completion, needed to communicate system state clearly while remaining resilient to unreliable hardware and network conditions.

Rather than treating reliability as a purely engineering problem, we designed the rider experience to make system behavior visible. Riders received clear feedback throughout the ride lifecycle, including connection status, ride progress, payment summaries, and parking validation. When communication delays or hardware inconsistencies occurred, the interface provided transparent system feedback and recovery paths that reduced uncertainty without exposing unnecessary technical complexity.

Operating scooters in public spaces required more than rider adoption. It required municipal trust.

Cities needed confidence that fleet behavior could be monitored, governed, and constrained through enforceable policies around safety, speed limits, parking behavior, and service coverage.

To support these requirements, I helped design city-facing dashboards that translated operational telemetry into transparent compliance reporting. Municipal stakeholders could monitor fleet availability, geofenced zones, parking behavior, permit metrics, and service coverage through interfaces designed for oversight rather than day-to-day operations.

Importantly, these dashboards were built on the same telemetry infrastructure used by operators. The difference was not the data itself, but how it was organized and presented for a different audience with different goals.

Rather than treating compliance as a one-time approval process, we approached it as an ongoing product surface. By making fleet activity visible, auditable, and enforceable, we helped secure permits across five municipalities while building trust through transparency.

A core part of my role involved modeling how product, operational, and pricing decisions influenced fleet economics. Using MATLAB, I developed forecasting models that linked utilization, pricing, fleet size, maintenance costs, charging operations, theft rates, and scooter lifetime to overall business performance.

One of the key insights was that reliability functioned as a business lever, not simply a user experience metric. Improvements in maintenance, charging coverage, fleet availability, and theft recovery increased utilization while extending scooter lifetime, producing compounding effects across revenue, gross margin, and long-term fleet value.

To support planning and decision making, I translated these forecasting models into interactive tools that allowed stakeholders to explore how operational changes influenced business outcomes. These analyses informed pricing strategy, fleet sizing, charging operations, and expansion planning, while contributing to the company's successful $850K+ seed raise.

• 650+ scooters connected and validated

• Permits secured across five municipalities

• Fleet operations platform deployed for mechanics and field teams

• Telemetry-driven monitoring identified reliability, maintenance, and utilization issues at scale

• Forecasting models informed pricing, fleet planning, and contributed to an $850K seed raise

• Designed an integrated platform spanning rider experiences, fleet operations, telemetry, and municipal compliance

Sun Scooter reinforced that in physical-digital systems, user experience is inseparable from infrastructure. Reliability at the moment of unlock, clarity during a ride, and predictable system behavior were not matters of polish. They were prerequisites for building trust in a product operating in public space.

The project also changed how I think about research. Telemetry was not merely an operational artifact. It became a continuous source of user research. By treating hardware signals, latency, and error states as experiential data, we identified issues that traditional usability methods alone could not surface and addressed them through interface design, system architecture, or operational tooling.

Perhaps the most important lesson was that product decisions, operational performance, and business outcomes are deeply interconnected. Improvements in reliability increased utilization, extended hardware lifetime, and strengthened fleet economics, making product tradeoffs more explicit and measurable.

Today, I approach product development as the design of interconnected systems spanning users, technology, operations, and business constraints. Whether designing consumer applications, internal tools, or research programs, I look for the underlying systems that shape behavior and focus on making those systems more reliable, understandable, and effective at scale.