How I (almost) won the eCanter challenge

In 2018, Mitsubishi Fuso delivered brand new eCanters – the world’s first all-electric light-duty truck, to different cities around the world. Lisbon got 10 of them. We at tb.lx loved them so much that we followed them around the city and created a challenge out of this.

As a software development company, we are spending most of our time with analytical challenges. We are writing hundreds of lines of code every day, we are building crazy architectures, we are streaming real-time data through our pipelines, and we are solving mathematical problems day by day. But every now and then we leave our office and come up with some not-so-analytical ideas.

Our company, tb.lx, is based in the beautiful city of Lisbon, and our mission is to create meaningful impact for Daimler Trucks & Buses. We are building global data-driven products for a sustainable future of transportation.

When tb.lx was created in the summer of 2018, under the name DTB Tech & Data Hub, our colleagues from Mitsubishi-Fuso Trucks Europe helped us with setting up the legal structures of our company. So I had the pleasure of spending a few days in the center of Portugal (look at the map, it’s really the center!), the plant of Tramagal, where the Canters for the European and US markets are produced.

During that summer, the eCanter was launched in different cities across the globe. Besides New York, Tokyo, and Amsterdam, Lisbon was one of the chosen ones receiving 10 eCanters to improve city life (zero-emission and zero-noise for inner-city circulation is indeed a good reason to use them!). The eCanters were given to different municipalities of Lisbon and are since then used for daily trash collection. Now we had a visible connection to our daily work driving around Lisbon.

I am not sure how this challenge started, but at one moment, we started taking selfies of us with an eCanter, when we saw one passing by, and posted it in our internal communication channel. Quickly the rules were established: “The person with most eCanter selfies until Christmas wins a bottle of port wine.” The challenge was on.

You can imagine that we often got weird looks by the guys driving around with the eCanters. We had colleagues who tried to photoshop themselves into a regular picture, and some people timed their coffee break to the supposed schedule of the drivers (it was an art for itself and not very accurate or successful if you ask me). At one time, we suspected that our CEO bought an eCanter including the driver because his selfies just kept coming.

The challenge came to an end last month, and there was a tie between me and our CEO, with a total of 7 pictures each. He still hasn’t proved us wrong regarding buying an eCanter on his own just to win this game, but I was happy to share the first place with him.

You might ask yourself now: Why am I telling you this story?

It doesn’t show a single line of code, a plotted architecture, or even a fancy PowerPoint deck. Although it might not show our work, our achievements, or our direct contribution to the shift to electric, it shows our culture, our motivation, and how even the tiniest things can help a team to move closer together.

Here in Lisbon, we don’t have a lot of touchpoints with the products we are working for. But the challenge of “hunting” after the eCanters made us investigate more in the product and its potentials and brought us closer together as a team. And we believe that this will improve our future work a lot! 

Thanks for reading, and have a great start into 2020!

#costumer-orientation #eCanter #challenge #teamchallenge