How to ensure your users don't die
Surviving a major car crash has shifted my view on safety. It's not just about compliance and legal risks, but about human lives. How do we manage product features when a user's life is at stake?
Hi and welcome to the Corporate Waters weekly newsletter 🙌
I’m Mikhail and I'm excited to share my learnings to help you navigate the murky waters of product management, leadership, and corporate dynamics. Subscribe to unlock the full value.
In today’s paid newsletter:
(Free) How we survived the car crash and how it changed my perspective on safety;
(Free) Safety by design - why you should start with strategy and aim for complete transparency;
(Paid) Safety maturity model and how to measure safety within your org;
(Paid) Safety taxonomy, approach to discovery, and ideation of safety features (with two real cases I've been leading).
Last Thursday, we almost died in a near-fatal car crash. When making a blind U-turn at the intersection between Tallinn and Tartu, we faced a head-on collision with a car moving at high speed (~90mph). I had a concussion and faded out for a few minutes. My wife sustained multiple pelvic fractures and could not move.
Slowly waking up in the car amidst the fumes of smoke coming from the engine, I heard a barely audible voice. It was a BMW support center specialist calling.
“Sir, have you been in an accident?” asked the caller.
Through the haze, I replied, “Yes”.
“Can you please give us your license plate number?” the support specialist continued. “It’s XXXXNZ," I replied, slowly regaining my consciousness.
“I can’t find the car here in the UK,” said the specialist, confused.
“That's because it’s registered in Estonia,” I said.
“Sorry, sir, your account is registered in the UK, and there’s nothing I can do to help,” concluded the support specialist.
When buying a car a few years back, I accidentally registered a UK account while trying to figure out how to use it. I was looking for an English website, and the top-ranked one on Google was British BMW services. Little did I know that I was now locked-in with British customer service support. This realization only came after the accident. Thankfully, the other driver called emergency number 112. Estonian health providers and police arrived swiftly and went out of their way to provide excellent help on the spot.
This event not only made me rethink the value of life but also the importance of safety in general. In the majority of companies, safety is a passing afterthought. It springs to attention only when a legal or compliance case comes up. Some old-school OEMs have the “safety by design” principle in their hardware but provide subpar software solutions.
When it comes to mobility, safety can’t be an item on the checklist or a simple compliance measure. Safety is about lives. You cannot wrap it up in a single metric or an A/B test. At Bolt, we understand the meaning of safety. When you’re operating in mobility services, you are constantly putting people under a certain degree of risk. It’s your responsibility to target zero-tolerance risk when it comes to people’s lives.
All these reflections made me want to share our internal process for mitigating safety risks. How do we define safety? How do we measure it? How do we make it a part of a corporate strategy? Why discovery, ideation and testing of safety features should be approached differently? Hopefully, some of these humble reflections can find a way within your organization and prevent your users from getting into accidents.
🏗️ Safety by Design
Safety Strategy
It’s important to start early, ideally when you plan your product strategy and build an organization around it. If safety is treated as an ad-hoc issue addressed afterwards, it’s likely to be handled on a residual basis. Whatever leftover resources we can allocate will be thinly spread across a few high-ROI safety projects.
This approach creates constraints. When solutions are built within constraints, they usually optimize for the first use case (FUC), ignoring all the rest. The problem with safety is that all the edge cases are as important as the FUC because the end result could pose a threat to human life.
In the case of BMW, the ability to lock yourself into a different country’s support is definitely an edge case. It turned out to be a life-threatening one when the actual accident occurred.
When safety becomes one of the pillars upon which your strategy and organization are designed, the dynamics change. There’s pressure coming both from the teams bottom-up and the higher-level management top-down.
Safety Transparency
Safety reports need to be made public for several reasons. First, this means that a company is acknowledging a problem and accepting both ownership and responsibility for addressing it. Secondly, the company is preventing most speculation. The data is direct, the methodology is robust, and the report sends a strong message.
A counter-example is Airbnb. They haven't publicly disclosed any figures or reports. Volunteers tackled this problem for them. Back in 2021, a group of data scientists analyzed 127k customer complaints via Twitter, exposing thousands of cases of discrimination, assaults, and unsafe conditions. The legitimacy of the reviews, the bias in the sample, and the meaning of those numbers in the context of the business as a whole are left out of the picture. What readers see are absolute numbers - thousands of shocking cases.
You can take a look at Bolt’s safety report for e-scooters here (1 accident occurs in every 50k rides, and a single injury occurs in every 100k rides, with the trend improving year over year). We strive for transparency.
🔍 Decoding Safety
What is safety?
If you launch a business that can negatively affect the livelihood of your users, you’ve got to start thinking about safety from the get-go. Safety is a multi-dimensional concept. It can be tackled proactively or retroactively. Multiple functions can be involved - product, operations, policy, partnerships, or specialized safety teams. Below, I'm going to focus solely on how safety is defined through the lens of the product.
The Safety Maturity Model
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