Overview

This case study centers around an AI-powered dashcam product with a web app for fleet owners, a mobile app for professional drivers, and internal thresholds that use machine vision to detect unsafe driving incidents.

Soon after joining the product team, I identified the root cause of a product-market misalignment through user research, identified accident exoneration as the most profitable target for roadmap realignment, and re-designed our most prominent accident exoneration feature to meet user needs.

Problem Statement

The majority of customer pilots began failing almost immediately after installing trial cameras, with three issues emerging in feedback to Sales representatives.

• ‍No time for daily coaching: Customers claimed they did not have the time or personnel to coach their drivers. This would require continuously watching the web portal and engaging with drivers on unsafe driving behaviors.‍
• Driver and union pushback: Customers were concerned about a coaching product causing employee turnover in the midst of a driver shortage, citing pushback from drivers and especially driver unions.
• ‍Accident exoneration: Customers were surprised that the product was not primarily centered on "accident exoneration", but rather on coaching unsafe driving behaviors to prevent future accidents. (It had several “emergency response” features, but this was considered an edge case/secondary feature.)

Proposed Solution: Re-Evaluate the Product-Market Fit

Before discussing the problem with my product manager, I took a few hours to better clarify the boundaries of the problem, check in with people at the source, and figure out if competitors were also seeing the same trend. Three internal interviews and a quick one-hour competitive analysis indicated significant changes to the market: "accident exoneration" was being proactively surfaced by potential customers and it was all over our competitors' landing pages.

This warranted a re-evaluation of the market landscape and how well our product met the needs of our target customer base.

Research Questions

Accident Exoneration

• ‍How big is the gap between our product's feature set and customer expectations?
• Why is this gap only resulting in failed customer pilots now, when the product had been released for years?
• Is there greenspace in this area to differentiate ourselves from competitors?

Market Segments

• ‍Is our target market segment shrinking?
• Which segment is bigger: the one targeting accident exoneration, or the one targeting driver coaching? Are they mutually exclusive?
• Are there other market segments that we are not aware of?

Driver Influence

• ‍Why are customers just now starting to reference driver unions and turnover when the driver shortage has been ongoing for three years?
• Do all drivers and driver unions oppose dashcams, and if so, why? Can this rift be bridged?

Driver Surveys and Interviews

‍

• A statistically significant portion of unionized drivers like or accept their dashcam.
  • 85% said that they personally viewed their camera as a positive (53%) or neutral (32%) tool in their daily work. 
  • 78% said that their driver union also viewed driver cameras as positive or neutral.
• Driver interviews revealed a journey of mistrust to appreciation, with exoneration being the tipping point.
  • 5 out of 6 interviewees experienced violence or threats while on the job, such as aggression from other drivers, carjacking, attempted theft, physical assault from passengers, or threats of false complaints if the driver doesn’t break policy.
  • 5 out of 6 drivers said that they personally viewed their camera as having negative value when it was first installed.
  • After the first exoneration, all 5 drivers said they see the value of dashcams and prefer to have them.

Buyer Surveys and Interviews

Conducting user research with dashcam buyers reinforced driver findings, while adding extra context and insight into accident exoneration from the employer’s perspective.

• In a survey of dashcam buyers, the most common reasons for purchasing cameras were "changing driver behavior" (42%), followed closely by "recognizing unsafe driving trends" (36%) and "accident exoneration" (33%).
• 6 out of 6 buyers reported initial pushback from drivers and unions, but:
  • This was solved by working with drivers to answer questions and evaluate the dashcams together.
  • Pushback stopped after the first accident exonerations occurred.
• 6 out of 6 buyers described the same evolution of their fleet’s dashcam usage:
  • After multiple accident exonerations, they started to see patterns in unsafe behaviors or precursors (i.e. route locations) leading up to accidents.
  • They begin coaching drivers on unsafe behaviors, setting safety performance metrics to see if reducing a behavior or changing elements of the driver’s environment reduces accidents over time.

The buyer research revealed a key takeaway: Professional fleets’ usage of in-cab cameras exist in a pipeline from accident exoneration to driver coaching, and we had unknowingly been targeting users at the end of that pipeline, when potential customers were already likely to have safety programs and KPIs coupled with a competing dashcam provider.

Competitive Analysis

A 3-day analysis of product documentation and hardware specifications reveals significant investments into driver exoneration, accident response, and driver-centric features.

‍

• Direct Video Request (DVR) workflows that send videos from the camera’s local storage to the fleet’s online portal by entering in details of the accident (trip, date/time, vehicle).
• “Panic buttons” that send text and email alerts and automatically upload videos from before and after the button press to the fleet’s online portal.
• Camera systems with 360-degree auxiliary cameras and improved video storage to prevent older videos from being overwritten
• Driver reward systems for avoiding unsafe behaviors and accidents
• Driver face blurring, lens caps, and scheduled camera shutdowns to preserve long-haul truck drivers’ privacy in off hours.

Key Takeaways

• The entire market is already pivoting to serve fleet owners’ goals of hiring and retaining drivers by addressing driver concerns.
• Accident exoneration features involve both hardware and software components.
• There is greenspace in the market through improved DVR workflows, camera storage, and driver rewards/privacy.

Roadmap Changes

As a result of the preceding research, I recommended that my product manager change the focus of our next year’s roadmap from improved coaching features to accident exoneration features, divided into three areas of investment:

1. Driver-Centric Features: panic buttons, privacy features, safe driving and performance KPI tracking for easier driver rewards, and case studies and sales materials geared toward common driver and union concerns
2. Buyer-Centric Features: Month over month fleet metrics to identify potential accident causes, camera health reports to ensure the fleet is always recording, and support materials for navigating driver buy-in
3. Accident Exoneration Features: Improved Direct Video Request (DVR) workflow, collision alerts, improved camera storage, multiple camera integration

The user research and proposal were approved by my product manager, our VP of Product, and our Chief Product Officer. Our highest priority would be the improved DVR workflow, followed by camera health reports, panic buttons, and collision alerts.