Driving the future of metropolitan mobility
Building an agile MVP and laying the foundation for Vay’s growth
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Vay is a Berlin-based teledriving company that’s on a mission to transform metropolitan mobility through remotely-driven electric VayCars across Europe and the world.
Founded in 2018, Vay has a team that combines expertise in multiple domains: From automotive and safety engineering to software, product, regulations, operations, and more.
The company’s vision introduces a unique teledrive technology, where a remote driver delivers the car to the customer’s pick-up location, later taking over from the customer at the drop-off point. This seamless experience eliminates the need to own (or park) a car and brings a new level of innovation to the car-sharing market.
Vay was at a crucial stage–getting ready for a trial launch in Hamburg while tripling the team in a sustainable way that could support its future growth. This is where our People and Tech teams stepped in to help.
Project A’s Talent Acquisition, HR, and Tech teams worked simultaneously to enable Vay’s immediate and future success:
Talent Acquisition
We focused on hiring high-priority roles, enabling the company to take over recruiting and handle operational aspects. Our team recruited six core positions: The Hamburg Operations Manager, an HR Manager, and several hiring and legal experts.
Vay’s team was data-oriented and hands-on, frequently analyzing and optimizing various KPIs (contacts, response rates, conversion rates).
In the spirit of cross-functional support, Project A’s Tech team provided professional support with recruiting and onboarding new developers.
HR
Meanwhile, our HR team was involved in hiring an HR Manager and helping Vay set up a solid People and Culture department:
- Define a structured career framework to guide performance management, feedback, and development
- Develop and implement the onboarding processes
- Establish HR “backend” methodologies, including engagement surveys, filling, and documentation
- Roll out employer branding
Tech
Vay’s Go-to-market is dependent on regulatory compliance, but the company nonetheless needed a product on which it could iterate and get user feedback. We helped them launch an internal MVP based on their VayZero platform, which they tested during the vConnect company event at their Berlin-based site. Project A’s developers had four weeks to complete the mission: Allow Vay’s employees to use the Rider app to order a car driven by the Teledriver and ensure people complete the journey safely and pleasantly.
Following Vay’s philosophy of a full-stack development team, our front- and backend experts collaborated with the in-house team, implementing a flexible and reliable tech stack that allows both crews to share tooling, reducing adjustments, conversions, and clutter in the short and long term. This convergence has already proven valuable, as the teams can work together seamlessly and save time and money.
Project A's cross-functional team of experts jumped in to support us with our Tech and People operations, helping Vay switch gears and scale up
The orchestrated effort resulted in a combination of tangible products and organizational frameworks that will serve Vay along the way:
On the tech side, we solved Vay’s productization challenge: They now have real-world data, and the tests allowed them to find and fix bugs and optimize both the Rider and Teledriver apps used by the remote car operators. Incidentally, we also delivered another app: An internal back-office software for testing car fleets management and user flows. We solved an operational problem by building a user interface that non-technical stakeholders could handle themselves.
On the HR front, our involvement resulted in building a People and Culture team from the ground up: Enabling efficient large-scale onboarding, reducing complexity for hiring managers and team leads while increasing accountability and engagement, adopting a data-driven approach to performance and career development, and setting up a clear path forward.
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Want to learn more? Contact us at stephan.schulze@project-a.com.
Stephan Schulze
