A while back a colleague of mine suggested that I start a series about the day of a product manager (or PM). Unfortunately, more often than we wish for our days as PMs are not too exciting to write about because they are full of long meetings, email exchanges, status updates, and unnecessary negotiations. Though, there are good topics to write about although not every day. One of those topics are the frustrations we all experience due to poorly designed software, tools, processes, and even physical goods.

While I cannot say that I can truly recommend the book (it’s a bit of a hard read, though, useful!), I think the title is quite good: “Don’t make me think”. The one thing I will add to it is “… and don’t ask me to read the manual”. In my humble opinion (IMHO, I just love TLAs 😀), a well designed products and features (as well as processes, tools, etc.) should be intuitive, easy to use, and don’t need lengthy documentation. For whatever reason though, we make things more and more complex and confusing. Especially when it comes to technology. Hence, I decided to start this series, which I will call “If I was the product manager (PM) of…”

In this series, I will pick a product or feature that I encountered during my day (well, maybe not every day), will describe my frustrations with it and will suggest a better (IMHO) way to implement it. You may not agree with my suggestions (and frustrations, at the end of the day you may think that the implementation is perfect 😉) but that is fine – you are (still) entitled to your opinion.

Disclaimer: Do expect some snark-iness in the series! And, don’t take it too personally if, by accident, I picked on your favorite product or feature – I am sure that I will pick on some of my own (or my team’s) in the future. Here, I will say it, apologies if I hurt your feelings.

So, let’s get started… with EvGateway.

What did I experience?

It is funny, I just went to their website to take a screenshot for the post image and it says “The Most Secure EV Charging Management Network” on the home page. I really don’t think so, but I will come to that in a bit.

Here is the story… My family has a plugin hybrid for a while already, but I had never had a good experience with public charging. From underground chargers that only allow you to use their app but there is absolutely no cell coverage in the parking garage, to different app for every charging station – the experience is ridiculous. It is surprising to me that so many people buy EVs and use them every day. Call me a conservative but I think gas has a long way to live.

The last time I used a public charger was about seven years ago or a year after we bought the car. I was still in the testing mode whether our next car should be just electric. Seven years forward and last week I decided to try a public charger again. The reason is, because we are remodeling our garage, for a week I didn’t charge the car. It looked that the work on the garage will go another week and I worried about the battery being not charged for too long. So, on Tuesday morning, I decided to charge my car at work.

Spoiler alert: the charging industry didn’t evolve at all in the past seven years.

You need support to charge your car!

I was able to take the last spot available and to plug in the car. I have ChargePoint on my phone but, of course, the charger was from another vendor – EvGateway. Scanning the barcode on the charging station send me to the right place on their web site, but pushing on the “Start Charging” button did nothing. The web experience ended nowhere. Luckily for me, Microsoft has a good cell coverage in their parking garages so downloading the app was no issue (unlike my last experience with ChargePoint). Registering with my personal email was also quite fast. But there is where the problems started.

Once I entered the station number, I got the message that I am not a member of the “group” and cannot use the charger. Very exclusive! Of course, it doesn’t say what “group”. Assuming that this is something internal for Microsoft, I went to the reception of the building to ask how to join the group. Receptionist just told me that I need to use the EvGateway app and apply from there. Surprisingly to me, the app has Live Support option, which brought my hope back that I will be able to solve the issue quickly and get my car charged. The support agent quickly explained that I need to create an account with my Microsoft email and join the relevant group. After that, I need to wait to be approved for the membership in the group.

While this was going on (it was already 15 mins back and forth), I had to join a meeting, so I decided to call from my phone and continue the chat with the agent asking him (I assumed it was “he”) to give me step by step instructions how to join the group. To that, he replied that they are overloaded and I better call him on the phone so we can solve that quickly. First, I already had him on the “line”, how calling him on the “phone line” will make things faster? Second, I was already on the “phone” for a meeting, so this was no op for me. I asked him to to send me step-by-step instructions so I know what to do. At this time, I was already giving up on having my car charged today.

He was helpful enough to send me the step and asked me for my Microsoft email so that he can update my account. I gladly provided it not thinking about the consequences. I also asked how long will it take to get approved and how will I know that I am approved. To that, he replied that my account is updated and my password is changed to “Welcome123”!!! (Now you understand why am I laughing on their home page statement that they are “the most secure EV charging management network”). Now, angry, I just asked one last time how will I know that I am approved for the group and after he replying that I need to turn on push notifications or check the menu in the app regularly, I ended the conversation.

App experience lacks usability

I moved my car, got to the office, wrapped my meeting and went back to the app. First thing I had to do is login again using my super secure password (“Welcome123”, really?). Of course, I had to confirm my new account email and I wait for the code to be sent to my Microsoft email. Next, of course, was to immediately change my password. Not so easy! Using my usual password length of 30+ random characters resulted in this message:

After some trial and errors (starting with the 1990s 8 char password length), I ended up with something that the app accepts and I find secure enough. I still don’t know what is the char limit and what chars are accepted in the password.

After that, I went through the menus to find where to apply for group membership. It is stuck in a menu option called “Coupons and Subscriptions”. I would have never been able to find it on my own if I have not asked the support agent for instructions. In the “Driver Group” option I found several groups with Microsoft name in them and some were equally appealing for me to apply to. Nevertheless, I chose “Microsoft General Access” and sent my application assuming that the approval will be either automatic (I just confirmed my @microsoft.com email, so I must be legit) or at most an hour or two. Optimistic that I will be able to charge the car in the afternoon, I went back to my usual work routine and opened my email. That crushed my hopes, because on the top was an email from EvGateway telling me that it will take up to three days to get approved for the group membership. I did not get push notification for that, so I went to the app to make sure that I have all push notifications on:

Three days after (on Friday)… the push notification came. At that point, I cared only enough for curiosity purposes to understand how this experience will end. I tapped on the notification expecting that it will send me to a specific location in the app but it just opened the app and showed me the home screen.

EV charging bills can be unpredictable

On Monday (almost a week after I started my ordeal and already thinking that remodeling a garage may be faster than charging an EV), I brought the car back to work in a second attempt to charge it.

I was able to plug it in and start charging it at around 8:20 AM. For a hybrid car with relatively small battery (~20 miles range), I did not expect this to take more than 1-2 hours. So, I was checking my phone regularly to see whether it is done. By the way (BTW), the app “conveniently” lacks a push notifications for when your car is done charging (you can guess why?). For about four and a half hours, the app was showing that my car is still charging.

Being worried that I will be charged $5/hour for idle time (assumption is that this is the reason the app lacks notifications), I decided to go check on the car after lunch. My charging station was blinking differently than any other of the stations in use. Assuming that it was fully charged, I stopped the charging from the app and unplugged the car. I also nervously anticipated the bill. First, the car did not appear fully charged compared to when I charge it at home – there was 2-3 miles difference of the projected range, which is 10%+ of error. But, the bill was only $1.02, so, I didn’t care so much. I am still not clear what the intense blinking of the charging station means because the app was still saying “charging” right until I tapped on the “Stop charging” button. My suspicion is that the car and the charging station don’t know how to talk to each other. Of course, the app send me push notifications that my charging session ended and I can see my details by tapping on it but that (again) brought me to the home screen.

Enticed by the low bill and the continuing work on my garage, I decided to try the experiment again in two days. This time, I got the same experience but different bill – $12.92 for the same time. I can drive an F150 truck 20 miles for less money than this!

Experience summary

Let me summarize my experience in a few bullet points:

• Unclear instructions how to use the charging station
• Horribly slow approval experience
• Convoluted app experience
• Variable and unpredictable cost

How will I solve it?

You can solve all the issues above with high tech, but you don’t need to do that for all of them.

Solution: How to use the charging station?

There is the high tech approach and the low tech approach!

Starting with the low tech, print a sticker with instructions and stick it to the charging station. Plain and simple, and costs much less than the software developer’s salary.

If you insist to be high-tech, though, print a proper error message when somebody tries to use the charging station from the web or the app. Instead of “You are not member of the group” (Or something like this, recalling by memory), you can be a bit more explicit and even helpful (there must be a database in the back storing the charging station locations and what groups those can be used by) and show something like: “This charging station is for Microsoft employees and vendors only. To use, you must join group this and that…”

Solution: Approval process

This should just be automatic. I have verified my @microsof.com email – match it against the group settings and be done in seconds. Taking three days to get the approval can only be expected by bureaucratic government organization. I am pretty sure there is an employee who manually approves those. Though, I am really puzzled by the schedule they use to do that – it is certainly not Monday, Wednesday, and Friday because I would have been approved on Wednesday.

Solution: App usability

There is a lot here and I may need a whole new post to just suggest improvements for the app but at the minimum:

• Rename the “Coupons and Subscriptions” to “Driver Groups” or if you need the coupons, make the groups more prominent in the menu structure.
• Make sure that tapping on the push notifications sends the user to the right place and not the home screen.
• A bonus suggestion, the search is useless – searching by station number yields no good results at all.

Solution: Unpredictable bills

This is the one that really frustrated me. At a minimum, send notifications when the charging is done. Yes, you got my ten bucks, but this is one time and I am not coming back anymore. There are only limited number of people you can scam – what is your business model after that?

But is is also expected the charging station to know how full the battery is and to report this to the app. If one cannot do that, then what is the point?

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Despite this experience with EV charging, I decided to rent a full EV on my next trip to Europe this month. Looking forward whether EU can offer something more. Stay tuned.