Welcome, SEAT MÓ!
I’m happy to announce that the new SEAT Motosharing service in Barcelona has been launched. It’s called SEAT MÓ. Its technical soul is powered by SEAT:CODE. Like a proud grandpa, let me share its story with you and thank the big effort of the team.
The Seed of a Sustainable Mobility
Fancy an electrical scooter ride for Barcelona? Of course! It’s August. It’s sunny. It’s Barcelona. Riding an electrical scooter it’s a pleasure, especially for the ones that we haven’t done it in a while.
You can download the SEAT MÓ App from your Android or iPhone, register with your information, and look for the scooters that are closer to you. The scooter is electrical! and it’s a «moto», «moto»! Beautiful design, a really cool pair of helmets, huge leg and trunk space, and what it’s the most important detail… it’s super fun to drive (you don’t want to miss the «Extra» mode in the moto). Nevertheless, for SEAT, SEAT MÓ, and SEAT:CODE it represents much more.
The launch of SEAT MÓ in Barcelona is the beginning of the beginning. It represents lots of opportunities open for improving the service: more vehicles, more usage models, private/public fleet combinations, other cities, who knows... but the most important thing is that the launch represents the braveness to start a journey that we all believe belongs to the future, that we all want to be part of it. It represents more than a service. It represents the safety of small towns without the hospital to provide easy connectivity using shared mobility. It represents supporting NGOs to keep helping people in need. It represents the freedom of small producers to distribute their local products. It represents the change to be respectful of the Planet.
A Revolutionary Service for SEAT
I joined SEAT one and a half years ago as CEO and CTO of SEAT:CODE. During my interviews, I had the chance to talk a lot about the future of mobility with lots of greater people including Dr. Sebastian Gram, SEAT’s CIO, and Lucas Casasnovas, SEAT MÓ and CASA SEAT Managing Director. A good summary of those conversations can be found in «SEAT, from Hardware to Software». To make it short: from cars to mobility services.
Ok, I guess what you are maybe thinking. «SEAT MÓ is just another moto sharing service». From the user standpoint, you are right. However, if you think about it for a second, for a car manufacturer like SEAT, launching a heavy digital based mobility solution as SEAT MÓ in Barcelona is a revolution. It’s a sign of the SEAT open mindset and the Digital Transformation that some of us we are driving inside.
Working for a huge company like SEAT has lots of challenges, but also a lot of benefits that any Start-Up would kill for: financial muscle, loved brand, multiple monetization ways, strong distribution channels, etc. If you combine a Start-Up approach with a powerful supporting company like SEAT, you have SEAT:CODE. If you add a refreshing business team like SEAT Urban Mobility, you have SEAT MÓ.
Looking forward to see our Scooters riding through Barcelona, this is the reward of hard work. @seat_code team, you are the bests. #SEAT:MO pic.twitter.com/oYExr4d0MD
— Txus Ballesteros 🦎 (@txusballesteros) July 28, 2020
So, I would like to thank everyone in SEAT who keeps pushing to grow such a fantastic company to other spaces out of its comfort zone, especially the SEAT Urban Mobility Team, and the ones who keep saving the traditional business model.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
I combine my responsibilities in SEAT:CODE with supporting Dr. Sebastian Grams in SEAT’s Continuous Digital Transformation. For the last 8 weeks, I have been teaching to different teams in SEAT the role of using MVPs in accelerating the delivery. With SEAT MÓ, we have followed the same approach, so my students will see that we don’t lie.
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” – Reid Hoffman’s, LinkedIn Founder
A moto sharing service has a lot of moving parts: mobile apps, back office for administrators, backend services, cloud infrastructure, IoT connectivity with the motos, payment systems, etc. So even for the minimum functional service possible, there is a lot to do. Without counting all the work done by the Urban Mobility team arranging the physical motos, or operations. This first release is the essence of an MVP. With a basic set of features (register, find a moto, book, finish the trip, and pay) and minimalistic but nice user experience, we have managed to implement this first MVP in less than 4 months. The great thing is that now that we have launched the service, we will keep iterating and improving the service on a weekly basis.
So, I want to thank all the team that has been directly working in the project by designing, developing, testing, prioritizing, etc. but also to everyone else that has been hiring a lot, keeping the morale high, looking for a new building, managing expectations, communicating our progress, and delivering other projects in other areas. We are building the best-mobility-platform-ever, but you are the best-team-ever.
COVID
If launching a product so quickly is a challenge per sé, add on top the COVID effect. In SEAT:CODE, we decided to send everyone home one week before the big bang of COVID in Barcelona. It has been an interesting internal trip for all of us. One example is the article from our Happiness Manager, Lucía de Pró, titled «The two-meter distance between the Office Manager and the Happiness Manager».
We have sent to homes all types of materials: screens, laptops, chairs, and even ingredients to prepare gazpacho. We have onboarded new employees in remote that we haven’t met yet face to face. Again, I have to thank the SEAT:CODE team for understanding the situation, being flexible and keeping working while been in remote. Hat off!
SEAT MÓ, First Customer
In SEAT:CODE, we aim to create additional revenue & profit streams to SEAT by creating and selling digital services not only to SEAT, and the other VW group brands, but also to the outer market. Following this goal, all the projects, products, and services we create, we build them as SaaS (Software as a Service). This way, we can provide mobility solutions not only for SEAT MÓ but for anyone in need of high quality, high performant, and flexible mobility platform to build on top.
We have now a powerful product, SEAT:CODE’s mobility platform: Multivehicle, multibrand, and multimodal for public and private sharing mobility. SEAT MÓ is using SEAT:CODE behind the scenes (Apps + Backend Services). We will share more details in the future, but if you are interested in using our platform in your company or project, you can reach us at the-best-mobility-platform-ever@code.seat.
Team Engagement
One of the main aspects to point, during this initial trip, is team engagement. I have been impressed by how the team has felt the project as its own. As SEAT:CODE leaders, Sergi Vila, Tom George and I tried to share the «why», give them autonomy and freedom, and provide transparency on the status. With these topics in place, the team has put the passion, energy, and commitment. Again, thanks for all your effort.
Technology Stack
At SEAT:CODE, as Center Of Digital Excellence, we are passionate about products and technology. For those interested in what tech stack we are using for building our mobility platform, we want to share some of the «usual suspects».
Our main infrastructure is running on AWS. For our mobility platform, It’s container-based using ECS with Fargate (we also use EKS), and our Infrastructure as Code tool of choice is AWS CDK. For building the backend services, we chose Kotlin and SpringBoot. For the client-side, we are developing native apps in Kotlin and Swift, and for the back office tooling, we are using a Single Page App developed in React.
We are hiring!
SEAT:CODE needs to grow because mobility is not the only area we work on. There is a lot of projects waiting to grow into SaaS. Take a look at our LinkedIn Job Offers or send us an email to jobs@code.seat.
Originally published on Medium.