Mobility as a Service: How We Turned a Slow, Expensive Project Into a Fast-Growing Mobility Platform

When we joined Urban Connect, the product was stuck: a bike-rental app with big ambitions, slow delivery, and a Swiss agency charging premium rates for releases that took months. The idea was strong — the execution wasn’t.

Our task: fix the pace, fix the process, unlock growth.

First, we audited everything left by the previous agency — backend, mobile apps, admin panel, CI/CD. The code wasn’t the real issue. The process was: multi-week approvals, fragmented tasks, no central backlog.

We restructured the entire delivery pipeline:

• created a single unified backlog
• removed long approval cycles
• restored CI/CD and access control
• introduced a weekly release rhythm

Result: features that previously took months started shipping in days or weeks. Costs dropped, transparency improved, and the product finally began to move.

With development speed restored, the business made a new request:

“We need cars. Fast.”

Instead of building a new system, we reused the bike-rental logic, adapted backend flows, tweaked mobile UI — and shipped a working car-rental MVP in ~2 weeks. Then we used the same approach to support scooters and any other transport type.

We introduced generalized models (e.g., TransportType, BookingFlow) and upgraded analytics and geodata in the admin panel.

Urban Connect evolved from a single-vehicle app into a multi-modal Mobility-as-a-Service platform, appealing to a broader market and investors.

The physical fleet relied on Raspberry Pi units and Bluetooth locks — previously prone to random failures and unreliable unlock commands.

We:

• updated RPi firmware
• added proper logging
• stabilized MQTT/REST communication
• introduced hardware monitoring and alerts

IoT performance became predictable. Lock failures dropped, operations stopped firefighting, and the system behaved like a real platform instead of a fragile prototype.

We formed a small but strong engineering core: backend + DevOps + a mobile team in Serbia.

To align everyone, we set up:

• weekly cycles
• a shared backlog
• clear ownership across backend, IoT, and mobile

The team became autonomous within weeks and could ship multiple streams in parallel instead of waiting on one overloaded engineer.

Once the foundation became stable, Urban Connect needed a full-time technical lead for long-term growth. We helped hire the right person, documented the architecture and CI/CD setup, handed over infrastructure — and exited cleanly. The product continued to scale without external support.

Final Impact

By the time we left, Urban Connect had evolved far beyond a bike-sharing app. The platform was faster, broader, and significantly more reliable — and the team could keep growing independently.

Key outcomes:

• 5–10× expansion of core functionality (from bikes → cars → scooters → multi-modal mobility)
• Major budget savings vs. the previous high-cost agency
• Development cycle reduced from months to weeks
• Stable IoT infrastructure, with reliable RPi + Bluetooth communication

A leaner team, faster delivery, lower costs — and a platform that finally matched the company’s ambitions.

“At our location in Visp, we have been relying on Urban Connect mobility solutions for years. We are pleased to extend the offer with electric cars and e-bikes to our Basel HQ so that our colleagues can also commute there in a climate-neutral way. Because sustainability is an essential aspect of everything, we do at Lonza.”

Andreas Bohrer Group General Counsel, Lonza