A Digital first Approach to EV Charging with Flo

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Transcript

Elena: So I’m here with Nathan from FLO. It’s been one heck of a MOVE America conference. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to be on the podcast.

Nathan: Thank you happy to be joining. And yeah, it’s been a year and a half already. And we’re getting into the home stretch that is happening now, but it’s good.

Elena: So Nathan would love to learn a little bit more about your story, and your background and your journey into electrification. I always find those stories really fascinating.

Nathan: I’m an electrical engineer by trade by training, so I went to college for engineering but then after that I had a chance to work in many different types of industries and many different types of roles. I touched home automation, connected home, fleet management software hardware and telecommunications. Also at Polycom doing audio video conferencing, and wearables. I had a chance to touch many different industries and had an opportunity to do technical roles, product roles and design roles. It’s fascinating because when you go to college and pick our engineers, right, I’m going to be coding or I’m going to be doing something and then realizing that as a branch of product function, and there’s a design function because ultimately everything you do is for human users, has been a great journey and maybe two and a half years ago, I joined Flo charging. They were looking for a Chief Product Officer that had experience in product engineering and design which conveniently I had I think they added the French speaker in there. I’m originally from Montreal, Canada, even though I’m based out of Austin, Texas. For those of you who don’t know FLO, EV charging is based out of Quebec City in Canada. So it just turned out very well and as a company we’re looking to expand in United States and so everything really worked out.

Elena: Your presentation that you did here at MOVE America, talking about some of the headwinds or some of the problems that the consumers are inevitably facing in this public charging cluster. Can I say that cluster? So Nathan, let’s walk through some of the things that you are focusing on at Flo and the things that you’re addressing for folks to feel comfortable driving an EV.

Nathan: One of the sessions where I had a session and in the hydro roundtable, which was sort of a follow up in a session and the name of the session was EV charging from for engineers by engineers to design for everyone by a little bit of a spin on the FUBU For Us, By Us, for engineers, by engineers. When I joined initially, a big thing that we’re trying to understand is what are the major problems in our industry that we need to solve? We did a couple of surveys and total probably 1000 plus users EV drivers and then we then did some qualitative interviews follow ups to try to really understand what the sort of told us that it was. The charging industry is like the enemy of for engineers by engineers were engineers to design the product that the chargers and network for their own personal use so they didn’t take into consideration women, minorities, folks with disability, where these things will be deployed and installed because they just thought about the object itself and thought about the environment in which it was installed. And it was staggering. And so we put pictures of chargers we put up mock ups of chargers we turn black and white took off the branding so that there’s no bias. And so we realized, okay, there’s really something that we need to do to try to fix it. And for context, we found that what would come out was of course, reliability as an industry, I think for those of you who drive EVs, I think it’s known that maybe chargers are not very reliable in North America and the United States that oftentimes the chargers installed but nobody maintains it or brakes work so that we expected that to come out in the surveys and the respondents, but we didn’t expect the magnitude of all the other problems like usability and comfort level with recharging and all those things. So actually, that was that was the session or was it was about different findings that we had. And then we had a workshop where we touched on Okay, now that we have these findings, how can we solve these problems together? And that’s a whole other sort of field where there’s how you build a culture, a team culture, to try to facilitate better problem solving.

Elena: Now that you know this info, companies like Flo and other folks that are in the charging world… so what happens next with that data?

Nathan: I jokingly say that the job of a product designer is to sort of predict the future and say no to things.

Elena: No, you’re right. Yeah, a few things.

Nathan: Well, yeah. First thing was that okay, we have all these problems. They’re all important, but what’s the most urgent what’s the most pressing for us to solve? Yeah, so we started ranking them at the session, I put some little fire icons next to it and most important was okay. Like, for example, one of them is that we need charging. How do you locate a charger in your driving? Grabbing a phone is distracting is not necessarily the best thing. So that’s a fire icon like we have to address it. Another one was when you drive up to the location, you can’t find a charger. You’re like, it’s hidden somewhere and there’s no visual cue. And so you’re like you assume it’s in front of the Walmart or front of a store because it was next to a dumpster somewhere. I couldn’t find it. And so, that was another fire icon. So we rank them that was one thing and then no product and engineers always love to solve things. They knew he would jump to the solution or some call it the execution mode and delivery mode, you want to find a solution, build it and you just build it and internally we we developed this thing called let’s have a dedicated discovery phase. And then have was we aligned on the solution and the design, then we’d love to execute and build the product. But let’s give ourselves a month, two months, three months to just diverge, come up with ideas, test out experiment. And, you know, Marty Kagan, he wrote a couple of books about product management. He’s a big advocate of that methodology was saying, let’s give some free space for people to disagree, critique, bounce ideas. And so we did and we created digital renderings of quickly and then we started cutting foam cores, and then we kept the design but it was like you know what, it looks really odd. So we reiterated, and then we took some outside and of course, foam cores are outside versus inside 100 different perspectives.

Elena: Yeah, that’s so interesting, because my brain doesn’t work that way at all. So I love to talk to people whose brains do work that way. So it’s so fascinating and really talk about what are you excited about in the next year in the next five years?

Nathan: I use the example of skeuomorphs on Apple products. So you know, the first iPhone had a big bookshelf, we’re fixing notepad in the backgrounds when people were asked, Oh, this is the app that I use to read books, or this is the app that I use to take notes because nobody had experience with touchscreens and you know, completely new is taking things into analog which traditional way of doing things and trying to bring it into the new technology or paying so for your for electric cars. For example, an example of a skeuomorph is that the public charge for exactly the same location with a gas pump used to plug into the same height to enable gravity to pump liquid against gravity has to go to tank and it’s at that high too. So everything is designed mimicking the gas vehicle. And there’s a bunch of Little Big Things we could say where things like reliability is not there. Whereas when we go to a gas station, typically it works. We have locations like New York, where we have 99.98% of time, so we’re close to the magical mythical fine line of up times, which is then it’s really reliable. And now start focusing on things that how can remove history remorse now now can we look at a digital first true EV experience and not try to mimic the combustion engine gas engine model and examples of that as I live in Texas or a car that the people know is not the most reliable grid power outages? And I would love to take my EV in the garage and they were back at my house for a couple hours and hours goes out. You can’t do that with a gas vehicle but you can. Texas is very hot. Sometimes we have to wait in the car for a little bit. The fact that you can use AC and some people do zoom calls even Google map now in Tesla, there’s all these cool technology things that we hadn’t really thought about yet that really gets excited because now it’s not just about electrifying mobility, reducing carbon emissions on mobility, but it’s about solving all these other problems that now because we have a digital first platform and digital solutions we can potentially solve.

Elena: Yeah, no, you’re right.

Nathan: Things are solvable. All the user experience stuff I think we can solve too. I mentioned within the telecommunication industry building a charging network is not unlike cell towers or cell network. So there’s a lot of these I would say it’s probably the most difficult is to get the Chargers out there. So we’ve talked to utilities most would say the problem is not at the generation side. It’s a different side for us. Of course, we can build chargers as fast as people need it, and we will deliver most reliable, usable experiences. But ultimately, we need to measure things like site permitting things like access to funds, subsidies and the grants incentives in place to help luckily these can be dispersed that utilities be able to bring power and distribution to location. All of these barriers to deploying the chargers is sort of slowing down. And ironically, because that’s too slow, there’s more peak demands. If I could wave a wand it would be like removing all those barriers and enabling faster deployments of chargers.

Elena: Nice thanks. I would love for you to just really briefly speak to how people can potentially reach out to you.

Nathan: We have a fantastic website, FLO.com, and so you can find solutions on our products you can buy chargers there, residential chargers, As you know, more than 80% of, depending on which research report you look at, charging happens at home. So that’s an important part of the solution. We have blog posts and I think we’re ramping up our efforts and blog posts to try to demystify things related to EV charging things that may seem obvious to some people but may not be so we’re trying to catch up and make sure that those are available. So I think those two places at least and for those of you I managers feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn to maybe I’ll answer a couple questions.

Elena: You’ve been so generous with your time, I know MOVE America has been a whirlwind of 48 hours of just meetings and speaking so appreciate your time. Thank you for being on the podcast and sharing your knowledge. It’s been awesome.