Tesla Fleet Management

Tesla's B2B Fleet platform is used daily by 21k users. It enables businesses to monitor, manage and optimize their fleet of Tesla vehicles. Learn more

My Role - Design Lead
Supported designers in defining vision and strategy for the project to align with business goals. Provided guidance, feedback, and support to designers working on the project. Maintain high design quality and consistency throughout the project

Team

  • 2 product designers + Design Lead

  • Product Manager

  • Multiple Eng Teams

Timeline

  • 9 months to release the first phase

  • 12 months until public release

What is Fleet Management?

Business owners purchase Tesla vehicles to support their operations. The fleet management tool allows businesses to monitor charging costs, maintenance, assign drivers, and reassign vehicles to different locations

Problem

Fleet owners had to use the interface that we provide to Tesla customers. There is no functionality to overview your fleet, its performance or costs.

Our customers used Excel to allocate vehicles between locations and to assign drivers.

Opportunities

Improve business owners experience

  • Enhance operational efficiency

  • Improve maintenance visibility

  • Simplify drivers management

  • Make it easier to scale fleet

Strategic opportunities

  • Build stronger relationships with business clients and improve customer retention

  • Differentiate Tesla from competitors

  • Collect and analyze data on vehicle usage

Research

Understanding As-Is Flow

I saw the importance of not jumping directly into designs, so I helped organize research sessions to ensure we had a deep understanding of user needs and workflows.

  • Visited our showrooms, service centers, and partners' service centers to understand how users request and allocate vehicles

  • Spoke with fleet managers from City Guards and Biogen

  • Interviewed leaders of logistics hubs

Goals

  • Enable fleet users to manage vehicles in one place

  • Enable field users to assign drivers in less than 10 min

  • Enable field users to reassign vehicles to different locations in less than 10 min

  • Enable field users to request new vehicles

Users & Pain Points

Field Operations 
Employee

Responsibilities:

  • Check fleet capacity

  • Onboard vehicle, assign drivers

  • Request new assets when needed

Pain Points:

  • No easy way to see how many vehicles are in use and are on order

  • Process of requesting a new asset is manual and time-consuming

  • No easy way to get an overview of fleet mileage, age, utilization

Fleet Manager

Responsibilities:

  • Assign vehicles to locations

  • Review requests, determine asset and acquisition type

  • Manage asset maintenance

Pain Points:

  • Management in Excel is extremely manual and time consuming

  • No easy way to overview fleet and allocate assets

  • No easy way to see vehicles utilization data, fuel cost and plan fleet optimization

Information
Architecture

Defining the information architecture first allowed us to see the big picture, understand how all parts of the project fit together, and prioritize what to focus on first.

I led a workshop with stakeholders from the Tesla Insurance, Service, Delivery teams, and others to align on the architecture, ensuring everyone had a shared understanding. This approach not only provided a clear structure for the project but also made it easier to communicate direction and gain alignment across teams.

Prioritizing

I worked with stakeholders to prioritize features based on immediate customer value and business impact. Maintenance and reports were initially deprioritized, as our primary focus was onboarding vehicles and clients into the system. Since tracking vehicles and drivers management provided direct value to customers, we ensured these were prioritized for the Public Preview. Maintenance and reports were planned as a quick follow-up release, ensuring they were addressed promptly after the main launch.

Aligning Stakeholders

For this project it was important to put wireframes for the main flows to share with stakeholders and leaders of impacted organizations. This project connected many systems together and is supposed to be approved by several organizations.

These wireframes helped me align organizations such as logistics, service, and finance around milestones and deliverables, gaining their support. We received a lot of great feedback that helped us define priorities and move on to high-fidelity designs.

Designs

It’s important of phase the implementation to ensure we delivered high-value functionality early while setting a solid foundation for future iterations.
We couldn't implement everything at once, so we prioritized functionality for phase one:

  • Fleet Overview + Map

  • Vehicle Details (General Information, Registration, Documents)

  • Drivers Management

Dashboard and Reports

Reports were one of the most complex parts of the project. First, we identified the possible metrics we needed to reflect on the dashboard and also defined all interactions to adjust it.

Custom Reports

Businesses can also set up custom reports. For example, for Tesla departments, we needed to track the idling percentage by department.

Drivers Management

Drivers management was one of the main functionalities we needed to deliver in Phase One, as it helps to identify unassigned vehicles.

Users can quickly assign or remove drivers from vehicles, ensuring that the right person is matched with the appropriate vehicles. Fleet provides comprehensive historical information about driver assignments, including dates, times, providing a clear audit trail and enabling troubleshooting any problems.

Request Form

The centralized request center makes it easy for field users to submit requests, while fleet managers can quickly view recent requests and fulfill it.

Despite the lengthy request form, we simplified the process by breaking it into steps, guiding users through each one smoothly. Users can always customize the steps for the request form.

Results

The platform was first released internally and used across all North American service centers and showrooms. In December 2022, it was rolled out to businesses in North America and the UK.

Learning and Challenges

  • Balancing Speed and Quality: The project required rapid delivery without sacrificing design quality. To manage this balance, I focused on detailed planning, prioritization, and ensuring the team concentrated on the most critical aspects of the project to meet tight deadlines.

  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Coordinating with various departments like Tesla Insurance and Service, each with distinct objectives and workflows, posed significant challenges. Workshops and frequent reviews were essential to align these teams toward single solution.

  • Remote Team Management: Managing a designer in Copenhagen and another in Seattle on the same project was challenging due to the significant time zone differences. To ensure seamless collaboration, I encouraged them to work more independently while setting up regular offline syncs and emphasizing the importance of keeping all files well-organized and thoroughly documented. This approach helped maintain alignment and project momentum despite the geographical distance.