I recently went undercover and worked with our teams in Paris without telling them who I was 🤫
As product leaders, we know the importance of talking to users to understand their needs and pain points. But conversations alone can never give you the full picture.
To truly understand our users and teams experience, you must step into their shoes. So, a few weeks ago, I joined one of our locker operations teams, pretending to be just another crew member.
Here’s some of the things I discovered:
- What works perfectly on the office workbench can become a completely different challenge in real-world maintenance. I experienced this firsthand when trying to perform tasks in the field that I had previously tested comfortably at my desk.
- Couriers (our power users) delivering and collecting parcels from our smart lockers have developed clever, unexpected ways to optimise their workflows. It reminded me of speedrunning in video games—where players exploit “bugs” to be faster.
Because we build both software and hardware, these experiences are even more important to stay close to those who use what we build every day.
I'll for sure do this more often and have already extended the approach to our product teams. Maybe you’ll catch us at a locker near you 😉
