Ryan Mahoney's podcast

Successful product management in public transit is about more than shipping features—it’s about delivering real value amidst an ever-changing landscape of policy, rider needs, and operational constraints. The key to innovation? Resist top-down control and create the conditions for teams to explore, iterate, and adapt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"The Capacity to Endure: Sustaining and Growing In-House Transit Tech Expertise" examines how public transit agencies are increasingly turning to their in-house technologists to address challenges like declining ridership and financial strain, instead of relying on costly external consultants. The essay emphasizes the importance of aligning digital teams with broader agency goals, integrating financial sustainability into strategic planning, and maintaining a focus on long-term viability through continuous decision-making. It also highlights common pitfalls to avoid, such as misalignment and resource mismanagement, advocating for the empowerment of internal experts to shape the future of public transit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In tech, when engineers and designers don’t work well together, it causes delays and poor outcomes. It might go unnoticed when this happens at, say, an ad-tech company that can easily absorb delays. However, in civic tech, where budgets are constrained and project failures put the public at risk, we have to consider every sustainable way to help projects succeed. The quality of collaboration between engineers and designers can be the tipping point, where small changes lead to significant improvements in delivering on-time solutions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Imagine if a transit agency spent two million dollars building technology-thing (enhanced by AI) that doesn’t make public transit easier, isn’t associated with increased ridership, and never motivates a person to take a train instead of a car—but thing was delivered on time and won an innovation award.In one form or another, technology thing is omnipresent in the shower thoughts and napkin sketches of government decision-makers, soon to be putting their finishing touches on a business justification to fund more cool stuff.Is this the high-impact work we left the higher-paying private sector for?What can be done about technology thing? Our suggestion: transit tech teams working in government must adopt rider-centric methods to avoid the threat of initiatives that don’t address the public's concerns. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.