From my time in startups to the past nine years at Amazon, there’s been one constant truth: Getting transportation tech right is a complex puzzle with a lot of moving parts.
It’s a monumental task to take an innovation from concept to roadworthy. Looking at trucking, you have thousands of small owner-operators and disruptions are inevitable and constant. Dynamics are also easily impacted by geopolitics, and anything you create has to actually work in the real world: trailers must show up, drivers need to be rested, swing doors need to swing.
How do you make it actually work? Understanding your customers at a deep, deep level. It’s glaringly simply but can’t be stressed enough. With that in mind, here are my top lessons for making tech customer focused.
#1 Your customer isn’t always who you think it is
It’s easy to think your customer is just whoever buys your product. But when I say “customer” that can mean a diverse group of stakeholders, partners, and employees. You have to put yourself in a mindset of knowing all the touchpoints that create and deliver your product.
For my team at Amazon Freight, our end customer that we’re serving is external businesses who can use Amazon’s network to move their products. But there is a daisy chain of customers before that that we work with as well: drivers, carriers, maintenance workers, support agents, yard associates – essentially everyone who touches a load.
Each customer has its own unique problems, and you need to understand their nuances and create solutions. Because, ultimately, what is good for all these customers is good for your eventual end customer.
#2 Recalibrate your questions
A framework to start with is asking questions focused on a customer’s pain and not a tech capability. A common pitfall is first starting with tech as a solution and then searching for a problem to use it on. This rarely works.
So instead of asking “What app should I create?” ask “How are my customers interacting with their devices?” Instead of “How can I use AI?” be specific and figure out things like “Where are my teams wasting time sorting through data that keeps customers waiting?”
I’ve adhered to this in my career and learned that you can’t just chase the latest new feature. It’s no wonder the transportation tech graveyard is full of great, bold ideas that failed because the leap from concept to execution was too far or the innovators were focused more on the bells and whistles and not the customer need.
#3 Get your shoes dirty
You can pore over the data and make your hypotheses but it’s not going to show you your customers’ true pains. The lesson here is to get out from behind your desk.
When I first came to Amazon, I led the Relay tech team. Relay is essentially the tech the Amazon network runs on and includes the app drivers use when carrying Amazon loads. I’d get everyone on my team out to observe drivers constantly. This means engineers, product managers, operators, and more. Everyone involved in building a product needs to spend time in their customers’ shoes.
These are essential interactions because you can observe behaviors that give you clues to a pain the customer doesn’t even know they have. For instance, we were watching one driver prepare for her tour. She would pull out her phone, enter the addresses of the day’s stops into a map app, and then check the weather in another app. It took her more than 15 minutes and she thought it was perfectly acceptable to do.
This “aha” moment led us to create something in the Relay app called the pre-trip briefing. It’s a summary of everything the driver needs to know before the journey begins – all in one place.
It’s just one small example, but the larger point is clear: Customers themselves don’t always know what their problems are and you’ll never be able to discover them if you don’t get out in the field.
Customer and tech harmony
This “customer obsession” is in our DNA at Amazon Freight. We don’t pursue tech for tech’s sake and aren’t distracted by the latest trends or flashy new capabilities. Our approach is that innovation must first serve the customer and be vetted and scaled to meet their business goals.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Amazon Freight can help you with your shipping needs, contact our enterprise team. Or, if you’re a smaller shipper looking to book loads on your own, create an account to start getting quotes immediately.
