We spoke with Mélanie Sedda about her role as PM at connected e-bike company Cowboy to learn more about her process and background.
Heather: Hi! What's your role on your team?
Mélanie: I’m working as a Product Manager at Cowboy, a connected e-bikes brand. Nowadays creating an e-bike is not just about making a bike. It’s also about building an entire ecosystem around it to make your experience as seamless as possible. And that’s exactly what me and my team focus on! We always ask ourselves how having a connected bike can actually make your life as a cyclist easier.
Heather: Tell me more about the company and products that you’re building.
Mélanie: The app and services we offer have 5 main purposes:
1. Guidance: You can mount your own smartphone on the bike’s cockpit and use it as your ride dashboard to follow your performance as you ride, control your bike, and be guided to your destination.
2. Security: We want you to ride without fear of getting your bike stolen. Our bike senses movements so we can send you proactive theft alerts if someone tries to snatch your bike. You can track your bike’s position at any time, and you can subscribe to theft insurance very easily in the app.
3. Safety: If we detect you might have fallen off your bike, we automatically warn your emergency contacts so they can give you a hand.
4. Fitness: You’d be surprised to see the impact an e-bike can have on both your physical & mental health. Our app allows you to keep track of your fitness stats in detail, share them with your friends and compare yourself to fellow Cowboy riders around the world.
5. Maintenance: A bike is something you need to maintain over time. Our app is a one-stop shop for our customers. They can easily purchase accessories & spare parts compatible with their bike, or get a technician come to their place to get their bike fixed. We offer a subscription called Cowboy Care to benefit from an unlimited maintenance service.
Heather: If you’re successful in your mission at Cowboy, how will the world look different?
Mélanie: We believe that e-bikes are the best way to move in a city and can have a huge impact on your own daily life and on your environment. It’s proven that e-bikes are the fastest way to go from A to B within a city. If you just look for a way to not be stuck in traffic or look for a parking spot for ages, it’s already a good reason to give it a try. It’s a very attractive solution from a financial point of view too as you don’t have to pay for fuel, parking, or insurance. More and more countries and cities also offer very attractive subsidies that make e-bikes even more affordable. Riding an e-bike keeps you active. The vast majority of our riders feel it had a positive impact on both their physical & mental health. Taking an e-bike instead of a car also reduces your CO2 emissions and makes your city less congested.
Heather: What core values drive your product development process?
Mélanie: Simplicity. We want to keep things simple for our riders. We don’t give them tons of options to choose from, as it can quickly feel a bit overwhelming and make our product less easy to use. We strive to find solutions that are sleek and simple that will work for the majority of our customers. That’s why we don’t have gears on our bikes and automatically adapt the level of motor assistance for instance.
Smart. We still try to adapt to what we know about you and your bike to focus on what matters the most to you right now.
Lastly, future-proofness. We know we’ll keep on having more bike models and more riders everywhere around the world. Keeping that in mind when taking decisions is crucial to not create too much burden as we keep scaling.
Heather: How did you get into IoT?
Mélanie: I joined Cowboy 4 years ago when it was still a small start-up of only 10 employees. They didn’t even start commercializing their 1st bike when I signed my contract. What motivated me to join them was their mission, their team, and their product. I think you don’t need to be a bike nerd or an IoT lover to feel a strong connection to our product and vision. I worked for a few years on the Operations team and transitioned to Product Management when a product team was created. My background is in engineering and the knowledge I acquired about the company and our customers in my previous role greatly helped me improve our product.
Heather: What advice do you have for aspiring product leaders?
Mélanie: Keep things simple as long as you can, especially in hardware. We started offering a single bike, without any accessories, just a few app features, and sold it in Belgium only. It was key to focus on what truly mattered, react fast, and transform our first customers into real ambassadors. You can start further expanding your offering when you’ve truly validated your product-market fit and learned from your first customers.
Heather: What’s your greatest product achievement?
Mélanie: We’re on the right track to increase our app rating by ~15%. It will be the result of a lot of joint efforts to better understand what our customers really need, create the most important missing functionalities, and improve the quality of what we already have. Our connected features are becoming truly outstanding and setting us further apart from other e-bike brands. Seeing all the positive reviews we get from customers and the press is truly rewarding.
