In 2019, Rivian and Amazon announced a joint venture: Rivian would supply Amazon with 100,000 electric delivery vans, helping Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, fulfill their Climate Pledge. In order to make this a reality, Rivian realized an incredible opportunity to develop their own Fleet Management software; a suite of enterprise B2B tools that enabled Rivian’s fleet customers to leverage an unprecedented amount of vehicle data, thereby improving driver safety, making vehicle charging, connectivity, and service more efficient, improve vehicle performance, and manage overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Starting as a Lead Designer, then soon after being promoted to Sr. UX Design Manager, my challenge was to lead our team of designers to build these tools from scratch within 18 months.

Foundations

As the Lead designer working with one other Senior designer, I lead our Fleet team’s efforts in building a design foundation that would be scalable, flexible, and work for multiple user types. We developed a number of foundational design artifacts to communicate our learnings and align senior stakeholders, including:

• Competitive analysis

• User research

• Personas/ Archetypes

• User Journeys/ “Day-In-The-Life” diagrams

• User flows

• Information Architecture

• Wireframes

• Interaction models/ navigation structures

This work came together in the form of a Figma prototype that communicated our vision to Rivian senior stakeholders, cross-functional partners, and to the team at Amazon. We fleshed out major sections of our Fleet application, including:

• Dashboards

• Functioning navigation & interaction patterns

• Purchase flow

• Service scheduling

• Over-the-air (OTA) software updates

• Charging management

Execution

Our Fleet team experienced explosive growth from 2021-2022, swelling from just me to a team of 27 designers, design managers, and design producers. Our suite of Fleet applications included FleetOS (our app for vehicle telematics and driver safety), Energy Cloud (our charging hardware management app), Connectivity Management Platform (an app for managing device connectivity), and ServiceOS (an app + 3rd party portal for managing vehicle service).

Between 2021-2023, our team successfully launched each app listed above, each with high-value, complex feature sets. Along the way, we developed a design system from scratch, built numerous prototypes, participated in hundreds of full-team design critiques, and built an amazing team culture.

Below are example screens from our apps, each of which have been developed or are currently in the development pipeline.

Leadership

As a design leader on our Fleet Team with up to 13 direct reports, I spent a lot of my time guiding the creation of the work above. To do that successfully, I found I spent my time alternating between different leadership tasks. Namely, most of my time was spent as follows:

• As a Coach, meaning facilitating/ participating in design critiques of my direct reports and others adjacent to my teams, working 1:1 with individual designers to both dig into work together and help craft career path plans, administer quarterly (!) performance reviews, and pair directly, when needed, with teammates to get hands-on in design, together.

• As a Diplomat, meaning working with cross-functional teams in planning/ scoping exercises, facilitating cross-functional design critiques, and constantly driving alignment.

• As a Champion, meaning managing up to both our team’s director and our Head of Design through sharing our work out, highlighting team successes, advocating/ securing resources (budget for new headcount, promotion rationale), and, of course, spotlighting teammates’ work.

• As an Architect, meaning scaling our rapidly growing our team, developing career pathing/ leveling frameworks, creating manageable meeting cadences for the team, and (lots and lots of) recruiting.

Credit to Peter Merholz for this excellent framework on characterizing the four “archetypes” of a design leader.

Results

With the successful launches of our FleetOS platform (including FleetOS, ServiceOS, Connectivity Management Platform, Energy Cloud, among others), Rivian enjoys a strategic advantage in the industry an OEM that features fully vertically-integrated Fleet management software.