Internal PM Case StudySupercharger & Fleet ReliabilityTesla (hypothetical)

TeslaGrid — Supercharger Network & Fleet Reliability

TeslaGrid is an internal-facing reliability cockpit designed for Tesla's charging and fleet operations teams. It surfaces real-time network health, predicts congestion and outages, and ranks work so teams fix what hurts drivers the most.

Primary Problem

Unpredictable charging experience

Outages and congestion erode trust in the Supercharger network.

Who I Designed For

Charging & Fleet Ops

Network ops, maintenance schedulers, and regional leads.

My Role

Product Manager

Discovery → framing → flows → success metrics; built as a live demo.

This app is built as a portfolio artifact. Names and numbers are illustrative, but the product thinking and flows reflect how I would approach an internal reliability tool at Tesla.

Context

The charging reliability and network ops problem

Tesla's brand promise is built on confidence: drivers trust that the car will get them from A to B without drama. But that promise depends on a global Supercharger network that can quietly fail—through outages, congestion, or slow repairs. When reliability is opaque, teams are stuck firefighting instead of strategically managing the network.

Pain points today

  • Network health is fragmented across monitoring tools, tickets, and spreadsheets.
  • Maintenance prioritization is reactive instead of driven by customer impact and fleet behavior.
  • Congestion is discovered after the fact, not forecasted around holidays or events.
  • Ops teams can't easily answer "What's breaking the experience this week?"

What TeslaGrid aims to do

  • Provide a single, ranked view of network health and incidents across the Supercharger network.
  • Predict congestion and outages before they materially impact driver experience.
  • Prioritize work orders by "customer minutes saved" instead of first-in-first-out.
  • Give ops, regional leads, and support a shared source of truth when things go wrong.

Users

Who TeslaGrid is for

Network Operations Lead

Owns overall Supercharger reliability metrics.

Needs

  • Single view of station health and trends.
  • Confidence that teams are fixing the right work.

What TeslaGrid gives them

A ranked backlog of incidents by customer impact, with forecast overlays for upcoming risk.

Maintenance Scheduler

Plans field technician routes across regions.

Needs

  • Clarity on which sites matter most today.
  • Tools to sequence work without guesswork.

What TeslaGrid gives them

A prioritized job list with customer-minutes-saved, travel constraints, and SLAs baked in.

Regional & Fleet Leads

Own experience in a geography or fleet segment.

Needs

  • Answers to “what broke and where?” in minutes.
  • Evidence for prioritizing investments across stations.

What TeslaGrid gives them

Regional dashboards showing reliability, congestion, and incident history for their territory or fleet.

Solution

An opinionated reliability cockpit for the Supercharger network

TeslaGrid is designed around a few clear product pillars. Instead of being "just a dashboard," it encodes how Tesla should reason about reliability: from the network level, down to a single station, with customer impact as the default lens.

Network Health

Real-time "stoplight" view of every station, with trends on sessions, failures, and throughput.

Impact-Based Prioritization

Incidents and maintenance tasks ranked by customer-minutes at risk, not just severity codes.

Forecasting

7/30-day projections of load vs capacity, with events and seasonality layered in.

Shared Source of Truth

A single workspace where ops, maintenance, and regional leads see the same story.

Flows

Key flows I designed the demo around

The live demo focuses on three flows that illustrate how TeslaGrid changes day-to-day work for operations teams.

1. Morning network stand-up

Goal: Align on what is breaking the experience today.

1Ops lead opens the Network Health view, filtered to the current region.
2TeslaGrid highlights top 5 stations by customer-minutes-at-risk in the next 24 hours.
3Lead drills into each station to see root-cause hints and related incidents.
4Maintenance scheduler pulls the ranked list directly into their routing plan.

Outcome: Teams start the day with a clear, shared idea of the most critical work, grounded in impact not anecdotes.

2. Prioritizing maintenance routes

Goal: Sequence field technician visits to maximize impact.

1Scheduler opens the Work Orders queue for the next 7 days.
2TeslaGrid scores each job using customer impact, SLA breaches, and travel time.
3Scheduler groups work into routes, seeing the marginal impact of adding/removing stops.
4Final plan is exported or synced to the existing routing system.

Outcome: Technicians spend more time fixing the worst problems and less time driving to low-impact jobs.

3. Holiday congestion forecast

Goal: De-risk upcoming spikes in demand.

1Ops lead switches to the Forecast tab and selects the holiday window.
2TeslaGrid overlays historical uplift from prior years and current fleet size.
3Stations predicted to hit critical congestion are flagged with mitigation suggestions.
4Lead coordinates temporary pricing, pop-up charging, or technician staffing.

Outcome: Instead of being surprised by holiday congestion, teams proactively mitigate the worst hotspots.

Demo

What the live demo actually shows

In the demo, these flows are represented as simple, opinionated screens — enough to show thinking without pretending this is a production system.

Network Health Overview

A table or map-style view of Supercharger stations with status, utilization band, and trend arrows. Filters for region, severity and forecasted risk.

Incident & Work Order Queue

Ranked list of incidents with impact scores, suggested priority, and a simple drill-down panel for station details and history.

Demand & Capacity Forecast

Lightweight chart of sessions vs capacity over time, with highlighted windows where thresholds are exceeded and callouts for events.

Outcomes

Target impact and how I’d measure it

Because this is a portfolio artifact, the numbers here are modeled — but the measurement mindset is the same as I'd use in production.

Target reduction in downtime

15–25%

Decrease in customer-facing downtime hours at high-criticality stations.

Faster time-to-fix

20–30%

Reduction in median time from incident detection to first technician touch.

Congestion risk coverage

80%+

Share of projected congestion events with a mitigation plan in place.

Execution

How I approached TeslaGrid as a product manager

  • Framed the problem in terms of driver trust and brand promise, not just internal ops metrics.
  • Defined personas and responsibilities across network ops, maintenance, and regional leads to avoid "dashboard for everyone" bloat.
  • Chose three anchor flows (morning stand-up, route planning, holiday prep) that tell a complete reliability story in a short demo.
  • Scoped the UI intentionally small — enough screens to show judgment and tradeoffs, without pretending this is a full production tool.
  • Anchored on measurable outcomes (downtime, time-to-fix, congestion coverage) so the app reads like a product, not just a visualization.

In a real engagement, this artifact would sit alongside discovery notes, data architecture, and an incremental rollout plan. For the portfolio, the goal is to make those decisions legible in a single, navigable experience.