#28 AI and the Driving Experience: Enhancing EVs Through Smart Technology
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Any person in the design business at their core needs to satisfy their customer. The twist that I like to put on it is to think that you can do better than what someone could imagine themselves. And it takes a little bit of gall to say that I'm going to come up with something that you never could have thought of.

Rivian vehicles have a number of fairly neat party tricks. If you open up the driver's side door on a Rivian, there is a little light that pops on that really helps you see in the dark. But that's not just a light. If you press on it, a little LED flashlight will come out.

speaker system underneath the console where a normal gasoline car with a gear shift would be. There's actually a removable Bluetooth speaker that you can take with you. A lot of neat tricks in a Rivian vehicle that you really don't see anywhere else. A lot of people ask me what's the most important skill I can have as a designer and I think they're expecting some aspect of design and I say empathy is the number one thing.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. And today I am so, so, so excited for our guest, Eric Wood. He is the vice president of product experience at Rivian. And for those of you who don't know Rivian, Rivian is the hottest electric vehicle on the market. They create adventure vehicles that are not only redefining transportation, but also doing good for the planet, too.

And what makes this guest extra special is that he's also my big brother. So we'll get into some nice sibling conversations in today's episode. A little background on Eric, just so that you know, he has spent his career in user experience and design, having led teams at companies like Telanav, Shutterfly, SAP, as well as a number of his own companies.

And today, Eric leads Rivian's efforts in designing vehicles that not only meet the needs of today's drivers, but also embrace future forward technologies paired with an environmental mission.

So we're going to dive into Eric's rich experience and explore Rivian's innovative approach to revolutionizing the automotive industry. Hey, Eric. How are you? I am great. So, so special to see you here. So I have a lot of different questions about Rivian and about UX and design, maybe a little bit about you as well. But I wanted to start off by talking about software-defined vehicles.

because this is a relatively new concept in the automotive industry. And I'd love first for you to tell everyone what is a software-defined vehicle, and then what does that mean for the product experience? Awesome. Well, a software-defined vehicle is exactly kind of what it sounds like. It's a vehicle like you would drive today, but instead of it being...

defined by things that go into the car, that ships with the car. And what you buy is actually what you get for the rest of its life. Instead, it's defined a lot more like your smartphone, where new software will come out, new features will come out.

And it's not just the software that you play with in the center display or even your driver display. It's like behaviors, like how your suspension reacts to bumps, how your accelerator pedal is mapped. We can create entirely new drive modes that give you access to things like better traction in snow, change the behavior of your vehicle when you're driving in sand. All these things can happen over the air because we're defining the whole vehicle in algorithms and

and software that can be over the air updated. It's so cool. When you're talking about this, it almost sounds like you had to build like two cars in one because there's like the physical aspect of the car. And then there's all the different things that the car can do as you change it. And then you're constantly changing it. So I can only imagine that there is a lot of complexity to that. Part of it is very intentional, but part of it was just as a startup, we couldn't spend

10 years perfecting our software before we shipped the car. So we spent a lot of time getting the hardware right. And that's why people review the product and they love driving it and things like that. But the software takes a lot of time. And so we got out a first version and it was enough and people were excited. But literally every month we update the software and

Only now, and this is like three odd years into it, do I feel like we're getting close to feature complete on the base system. Cool. So I'm curious to know a little bit more about what you hear from the market in terms of what people want. Because I think what I've

seen and having experienced Arabian, there's a lot of features that I'm like, wow, I couldn't have even dreamt up this feature myself, but I didn't know I needed it until now. And I'm curious to know, as you look into the future, what are the types of things that you expect to see in EV vehicles or software-defined vehicles that users are really asking for that you think will become commonplace? Yeah.

Right. Well, you touched on something that is really near and dear to me, and that is the difference between what people ask for and what they need and then sort of what you can imagine for them. And I see my job as a designer to deliver things that people could not have imagined themselves, because if they could, then...

that's great. Like we, you don't need me, like ask them what they want and we'll give it to them, you know? And, you know, Henry Ford famously said, or at least that's the legend, you know, if I gave people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse and carriage. Right. And so I think the biggest thing that people need that they don't realize they need right now is integration into the whole vehicle. And, and,

Perhaps a better way to say that would be the thing that people are asking for is CarPlay and Android Auto. Because right now, if you own not a Tesla, not a Rivian, that's the best in-car experience that you can get. But it has a lot of disadvantages. It's not integrated into the car very well. This weekend, I was driving around LA in a rental car. And basically, every time I started a route, because I'm traveling and I don't know where I'm going, like

Like the car's facing the wrong direction. I was in a location with no reception. So there was no way for me to go from A to B because I had no reception. So there's a lot of things like that people sort of live with and they don't realize they need a better version of. So the thing that I want to deliver to them is an experience that is completely seamless. So it has all the personalization that you would expect from a phone. So like integrated text messages, audio,

great navigation, like my music and all those things that I expect from an infotainment perspective, but it has to be integrated into the vehicle so I can use the steering wheel controls. When I'm routing to some place, my address book is there. It'll automatically stop at the right charger. And then looking forward a little bit into the way that car companies will be using AI, they'll start doing things like

route a trip to Kirkwood in Lake Tahoe. Okay, that's easy. But I have my dog with me and I need to stop at a place where the dog can pee. Okay, that's cool. And by the way, I'm vegan. And then it's like, okay, well then here's a charge stop that's a thousand feet from a vegan restaurant.

It has a place for the dog, you know, like all these things that you can just have a conversation with someone and it just happens to be that person's artificial. That's amazing. So it's like when you're on a road trip and you have someone in the passenger seat and you're like, hey, can you find a place where we can stop? And I feel like a sandwich and I really want to, you know, see that lookout point or whatever. So it's like a friend in the car with you. Co-pilot. Yep. Co-pilot. That's a better way to put it. I love it.

So something that I think about a lot is...

I mean, especially when you're building something as complex as a car that not only is physical and digital, is collaboration. Like, how do you collaborate cross-functionally at Rivian? The stakes are really high and the complexity is really complex. Like, what are some of the ways that you go about that? Yeah, collaboration is something that I've kind of hung my hat on for my entire career. Mm-hmm.

I look at design as a big tent kind of experience or a big tent kind of task. You know, I don't care about where ideas come from. All I care about is that we get ultimately the right experience. And so working really closely with engineering and when you're working in a car company, it's not just software engineering, it's electrical engineering, it's hardware engineering, it's dynamics, it's homologation, all those types of groups involved.

And so primarily, at least personally, I'm in a relationship type of person. So I work with people, understand them, and then spread that mentality throughout my leaders. And then when we work together, we solve problems together. Yeah.

Ultimately, you have to have accountability and someone's got to make the hard decision. But in order to get to the thing that you need to decide on, it has to be something that you can draft ideas from anywhere. Yeah.

And that's the important part and making people feel part of those decisions. Yeah. We can't just tell people what we need to have. We need to listen as well. And that creates so much more space for innovation. If we put multiple minds together that feel like they can share and that they have an opinion and that they will be heard, it's really a breeding ground for great ideas. Yeah.

So, I mean, it makes a ton of sense that that's something, I mean, your team is like at the center of so much of this, right? You're coming up with ideas and creating designs, but then other people have to actually implement it. So I can only imagine how important that relationship building is.

And it's actually kind of interesting because I think both you and I have a very strong relationship building component in our leadership styles. Like we really work to hear other people empathize with other people. And just as you're saying that, I'm like, I don't know what dad did, but there's something about how we grew up that has really inspired that for both of us. And I think that has helped us quite a bit in our careers.

Yeah. You know, a lot of people ask me, you know, young designers are like, okay, what's the most important skill that I can have as a designer? And I think they're expecting, you know, whether it's the tool that they're using or like, you know, some aspect of design. And I say empathy. Empathy is the number one thing. Not only does it help you understand who you're designing for, but it also helps you understand like who you're working with. Yeah.

And when you put those things together, then you can have a real like person to person conversation with your collaborator and solve a problem in a way that you couldn't have done by yourself and they couldn't have done by themselves. Completely. Do you think empathy is a skill that you can learn or is it something that you're born with?

This is an interesting topic. I think it is a skill that you can learn, but I think there are a few people in this world that simply lack it. And so I don't know if they can learn it or maybe fake it. I don't know. But those people are not good designers. In fact, some of the most important people in the world probably lack empathy. I think as a user experience designer, you have to have that because you need to be able to see through their eyes and...

walk a mile in their shoes. And then you can visualize how the thing's going to be working and maybe

fix things before you launch it and then get all the angry flames on Reddit. Yeah, completely. I think at the very least, like I agree with you. I think that empathy can be learned. I think some people have a natural knack for it or something that's happened in their lives that required them to really build that skill early on. I think it's something that it, it takes time and it takes attention to really like build that muscle of, of

Putting yourself aside for a moment and really embodying or working to embody what someone else is experiencing so that you can truly understand it yourself. And I also think, as you were saying, that, yes, there are some people who just do not have empathy and there are some of the most powerful people in the world. But I think in order for them to be successful, they need empathetic people around them. And.

Just at its core, empathy is one of the most important skills, I think, in business, let alone anything that has to do with users or customers. Like in the CX world, we need to be able to empathize with our customers. And it's one of the number one things that I hire for when I'm hiring people is do they have that empathy?

knack for really understanding those around them, both externally and internally within the company. And yeah, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that and like what you look for in a designer. I think there are two camps to hiring designers. And I think the second camp, the one that I subscribe to is gaining momentum, I hope. And that is the no rule. Hmm.

I started designing in the Steve Jobs era where everyone was like trying to emulate Steve Jobs. And there are like he's a genius. But unless you're Steve Jobs, you don't get to be an a**hole.

Sorry, like there are there are plenty of people who act like that. And I'm like, no, no, this is not working. And and one one bad seed can can destroy the the community and the the collaboration and trust that you build up within the team, within the larger team. So your your primary stakeholders and things like that.

And then you're no longer getting the best ideas from three different teams. You're now getting, you know, one and everyone's kowtowing to that person or making accommodations for just how angry they get. Um,

Or how rude they are. It just doesn't work. You don't get the best out of people. Yeah, completely. And it really can be a... I kind of think of it as like a virus sometimes within an organization. If you have someone who's like just really not wanting to play ball and not wanting to listen to other people. And it just, it brings everybody else down. And I think that's something I'm actually... At this moment, I have two coaching clients who are dealing with...

a bad hire, someone who was just not the right fit for a number of different reasons. It wasn't the right role or the company has kind of changed its startup and, you know, the needs have shifted. And in both of these situations, there's a person who's just like not really jiving with the rest of the team or not really pulling their weight. And it's bringing everyone else down. And I think there's something that leaders really need to acknowledge in

if you do have an or bad seed that like, it doesn't only impact that person's work, but it impacts other people's work. And it's,

it can be really dangerous for your business to have that in-house. 100%. And I think the larger question is, is that person salvageable, right? Because oftentimes people have great talent and maybe they worked at a place that, you know, they were emulating their boss who is a complete jerk. During those situations, I like to have a very like deep, honest, raw conversation and just be like, look, I'm just going to like

no holds barred here, have a conversation with you about how you're acting and what the effect of that is on the team and what I expect out of them. And it's not a, um, it's not a mean conversation and it's not a threatening conversation. It's just a very open conversation. And oftentimes it takes people aback so much that you're just so open that they, uh, they rethink that. And I've had, um, designers, great, great talented designers where they've been acting like that,

Had the conversation. Okay. Didn't stick once, but it worked for say six months and then I had to have it again. It stuck for nine months. And then actually after that, it did stick. So even I didn't give up on this one person and eventually they came around and I was like super happy because.

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can help you to realize value quickly. To learn more, visit salesforce.com slash products slash data. Completely. And I'm really glad that you say that because I've had the same thing where I've had people where I'm like, okay, this isn't working out, but we have to give them a chance. Right? And also sometimes it's not working out because of the environment they're in or something that's external to them that myself as a leader can help to

you know, ease that or take one of those barriers out of the way. And I've also had folks where after a couple of hard conversations, they really shifted and, you

you know, saw what was happening. Cause I mean, we all have blind spots. We don't necessarily know how other people are feeling as a result to our actions. And so I think it's always important to give people the benefit of the doubt and have those honest and clear conversations. Like clear is kind. It is much more kind to be straightforward with someone than to beat around the bush because you don't want to have a hard conversation. I like that. Clear is kind. I'm going to use that. Mm-hmm.

Brene Brown. She's a wizard. I love it so much. So coming back to, I mean, we can, this can really be in relation to anything, but I like to ask this question.

What's a hard lesson that you've recently learned that's changed your outlook or approach to your work? I'm constantly having epiphanies and modifying my style, finding the right balance between what the vision of a product is and how much freedom to give the team to sort of explore and

And in the past, I think I've been a lot more erring on the side of like wanting the team to explore on their own and really sort of build something they feel like they can own. And that works well, I think, in a smaller team. When you have a product as large and as complex as what we do at Rivian, the team really needs, or at least I have found what's been working well for me in the last, say, year is setting a vision.

And then having people buy into that vision and then they can glom onto something because there are a lot of ways you can solve a problem. But when you have real clarity about what you're trying to achieve, then they can work within that solution space and really do something interesting. And then you have all the teams marching in the same direction. And so something as big and as complex as Rivian, I've modified my style to be a lot more directive on the vision side. Mm-hmm.

And I think it shows in the recent products that we've shown, like the design of R2 and R3's user experience and things like that. And so what's an example of that? Because it's like giving a high level vision, but not telling them how to do it per se. Am I hearing that right? That's right. Yeah. You don't want to, especially when you have like super talented directors like I have, like you don't need to do that. Yeah.

A hundred percent. I mean, I think in any, at least in my experience and most of my experiences, I mean, in very early stage startups or hyper growth startups. And I think the, I like to say like, I'll build the, I'll build the sandbox and maybe I'll give you a, like a mold that I think is, you know, helping us to get to the direction that we want to get to. But you have the sandbox to plan. Here's the boundaries and you can go, um,

do whatever you want with the materials that you have. That is something that you believe is the right direction to go in. And I'm here for feedback and support, but you know, there's a, there's some clear lines to, um,

what you're doing while also the freedom to really create and innovate. And that is so much more motivating if you're coming up with your own solution. That's right. One example that I have always done, but I think really clarifies things for the design team is to do to be the translator between the business goals and then the design strategy, because there's many ways you can solve a problem, as I said. But like

how we want to solve this particular problem. And so every month I have an all hands meeting and I retranslate that. Okay, everyone, here are the four business goals that we have as a company. Here's what we're going to do. We need to deliver this. We need to deliver that. Here's how we're going to do this. That is sort of the first level of getting people aligned.

And then the second level is like really figuring out what we're going to focus on. Recently, we showed a revolutionary way to control the vehicle and it's through these two things. We call them halo rollers or I don't know, we'll come up with a good marketing name for it. But are these giant rollers on the steering wheel? And yeah.

These actually came from the design studio. So these are the people who designed the interior and exterior of the car. They said, hey, wouldn't it be cool if you had these like giant metal wheels and you could like play with them? And I thought, wow, that's fantastic. But they're so big, like we should do something special with them. Maybe we can get rid of the left and right buttons so you can just like tilt them. Because I've seen that in other cars before. And if

If you roll them, like it would be great if you could see what you're rolling like on the screen. And so through a lot of collaboration with the electrical engineering team and the design team, we came up with this idea where the motor is actually like these wheels are driven by motors and you can actually feel the

the detents of like what you're seeing on the screen. So if you're flipping something, it's quite large, like paging something, like different widgets or something. You can feel things go like chunk, chunk, chunk. And if you're, you know, changing the volume, it's like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, right? Yeah.

And my point of that, though, was really like, okay, here's something we want to hang our hat on. Okay, let's put a lot of effort into this. And so the team focused on that and it came out fantastic. So instead, we deprioritized a lot of other things like other switches in the car and things like that and just concentrated our effort on that. And I think that's what I mean by leading through vision and getting people to focus on a clear idea of

and making it awesome rather than spreading it thin and trying to boil the ocean. Yeah, completely. Something that comes to mind, I mean, as you've been speaking about this car the entire time is just the level of complexity and being able to create a simple experience with a really complex product I can only imagine is very hard. And you,

You kind of just did this with the R2 and the R3 and the fact of like you have the dream vehicle. I know you've said to me before, it's kind of it's the yes and like, oh, that would be cool. Let's add it. We can. And now you're like there's the cost pressure and the, you know, just refining the vehicle more. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about your process of making something more simple when it is coming from a very complex place.

Wow. That's a massive question. So you're absolutely right, though, that the hardest part is to make something affordable. And so a lot of the litmus test that I apply to the features in the car, because there's no lack of ideas. There's, you know, we have ideas coming out of our ears. Instead, I try to look at, OK, well, what would someone buy this car for?

And what would someone decide not to buy this car if it weren't there? And so some of the decisions that we had to make, switches. Switches cost a lot and they're convenient, right? Like if you have like a physical lock-unlock switch on the door, many cars do. Tesla doesn't. Rivian doesn't. We save...

some money there. Instead, we have something called passive unlock, right? So your phone is your key. You walk up to the car, the door handles deploy or it automatically unlocks.

depending on what behavior you want the car to do. My point is, though, that the things that you might want to buy this car for are these cool wheel things that you can talk to, and it's amazing. It changes the experience of driving the car. It also allows for software updates in terms of just adding new features to it. If you've got 15 buttons on your steering wheel, and they're all silkscreened and labeled, if you've got these really unique things that aren't just...

for appearance, they actually really extend the product and make it a cool new way to use the product.

That's something we want to spend our money on. And then, you know, the mundane stuff that people are not going to decide, oh, I don't want that car because it doesn't have a physical lock unlock button. OK, maybe we can save a little bit of money there. So it's a lot of those decisions day to day. Prioritization, it sounds like. Like, what are the things that are really going to move the needle for the user? And what are the things that are maybe we can do without? Am I hearing that right? Yeah, it is. But the prioritization is a complex matrix, as you can imagine. And

Sometimes the way that you can solve that problem is actually to rethink it from first principles. So not having a physical lock unlock button on the door. Here's the use case. You come to the car, you open your door and the kids or your families on the other side of the car and they need to get in. So normally you just

hit the unlock button and then all the doors unlock and they can hop in and everyone's happy. So if you eliminate those, what can you do? Okay. So we thought of many, many different use cases. So one of the things we included in R2 and then in the future R1 as well is a pressure sensor on the door handle. So that means that if you walk up to the car and some people are concerned about safety, they don't want the door handles to automatically deploy because that's an advertisement that says my car is unlocked. You can press the door handle

And the door handle will pop out. Great. So now I can open my door. None of the other doors are open. So if you're in a dark parking lot and you're concerned about safety, can you hop in? Great. But now you have the kids. So everyone's running to school and how, like, you don't want to like have to get in the car and,

tap the screen and then have the other doors unlock. You want to do it right away. So we created a behavior where you long press on that door handle and after one second, all the other door handles unlock and then you release your thumb and your handle comes out. So we've thought about like, okay, we eliminated all these switches on the inside and we've created a better experience for that customer by just sort of innovating on that whole sequence of events and

And in order to do that, like we had to collaborate with the software engineers and electrical engineers, because normally when you press a button like that on the down press, it does something.

And now we had to say, okay, we're going to eliminate the down press. We're going to only have it on the up release. And, you know, it gets really wonky, really, really into the weeds about signal and things like that. But I have all my designers like lean into that technology because then they can understand like how they can make this better. Mm-hmm.

A couple last questions for you. The first is what key resources do you read, listen to, look at, to...

keep you on top of design and user experience? I don't know if I'm, if I'm ashamed to admit it or not, but I watch a lot of YouTube. Uh, I, I watch a lot of creators out there who are looking at other cars, explaining things. I love to watch YouTubers try to explain the products that I've designed and see like how they're interpreting it. And sometimes we were clear and we

They got it. And sometimes they don't get it. And I'm like, OK, clearly we have to change something here because they thought this and that's not what's happening or what was intended. So the other aspect, though, is what do you look at? And this is, I think, a car industry historical thing where.

Car companies look around and they look at what their competitors do. And you see a lot of groupthink and it's like schools of fish. This year, I felt like we were sufficiently ahead in the thinking that we've got, at least in the hopper. It became less useful to look at what other car companies are doing. And we had to look outside. We had to look at other industries that are doing things. And to a certain extent, the mobile phone industry is interesting, especially when it comes to UI language.

But when it comes to like fundamental user experiences, the phone is so much simpler than what we're doing in a car. And you just have to go from first principles. Like we do a lot of things manually.

you know, journey mapping where we have storyboards and we, we build little comic books that, that show like how people use something first in abstract and then in detail. And we use those little storyboards to, to get everyone on the same page, get the electrical engineering team, get the software team and sort of empathize and understand what that user is trying to do and how they're going to use it. And then you can,

come up with something that's unique or that has no reference from past stuff. You've mentioned first principles a couple of times, and I'm wondering if you can give a quick overview of what that is, because I know it's a part of your process. Yeah, I mean, I think it means different things to different people. For me, it means looking at the fundamental goal that user has, not what things that they want to do. Like, for example,

Rivian got a lot of flack because we don't have manual moving vents. This is like grabbing onto the wind vanes on the vent and aiming it at you. And instead, we do it digitally through a touchscreen, which is arguably a lot harder than just moving the vent. But stopping there is missing the point. The point is not that as a user, I want to be able to grab vents and aim it at me easily. The point is that when I get in the car, I want the vents to be how I like them and

And so having robotic vents that remember your settings and then your spouse gets in and her settings are there or that when there's a huge temperature difference between your set temp, say 72 degrees and the cabin temperature, which is like 110 in the middle of the summer. We don't want to blow like hot air on you because the air and the vents are already hot. So let's just robotically tilt them away.

purge all that hot air. And once it starts to get cool, aim it directly at you. And then once you get close to your set temp, let's move them away from you again so that you're not getting wind on your face, which is sort of annoying. So the first principle part of that is understanding the goal. The goal is I want to be comfortable, not I want to easily move the vents. Yeah, completely. Oh, it's so cool. All right. Yeah.

Two last questions for you. The first is, I'd love to hear about an experience you've recently had with the brand. And what was that experience and what left you impressed? I can tell you a negative one. Great. When I saw you on this weekend, I was wearing them. I bought a pair of shoes which looked fantastic on Amazon. And I'm like, wow, these are really inexpensive. I should just give these a try. And they came in

And they photographed well, but they're basically like wearing a plastic bag. And I will never buy these shoes again because they were built for photographing, not built for wearing. And as product designers, like we, you know, the brand is the most important thing that you have. And if you build something that looks great and you sell a lot initially, you're

But when you use it, no one will come back. Like that's a dead end business. Totally. We got to think the long game here. Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Completely. And then my last question for you, Eric, is what's one piece of advice that you think every customer centric leader should hear? So advice means that

To me, it's something that they're not doing that they should be doing. I think any person in the design business, whether it's CX, UX, product design, whatever it is, at their core needs to satisfy their customer. The twist that I like to put on it that not everyone does is to think that you can do better than what someone could imagine as the

the customer themselves. And it takes a little bit of gall to say that, look, I'm going to come up with something that you never could have thought of. And so it's not necessarily being customer responsive so much as trying to do better for your customer in a way that they haven't asked for. The empathy piece is very present in that.

Really understanding what it is that their problem is, not only what they want, but like, what are they struggling with and how can we solve it beyond their wildest dreams? I think that's a great piece of advice. Well, thank you so much, Eric. It's been such a dream to have you on the show. Really, really appreciated this conversation. And I hope mom and dad are listening. Okay.

I'm sure they will be. Anyways, I'll see you soon. And thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. Take care. We are clearly in an AI revolution. And thankfully, Salesforce is helping customers navigate each new wave of AI. But the question is, how do you actually use AI effectively? And my answer to you is, it starts with your data.

With Salesforce's Data Cloud, you can connect, federate, and harmonize all of your data from any product and system in Salesforce. To learn more, visit salesforce.com slash products slash data.