Urban Flow
Smart city interface designed to optimize traffic and energy consumption in real-time using IoT sensor data.
Overview
Urban Flow is a smart city command center that aggregates real-time data from over 4,000 IoT sensors — traffic cameras, air quality monitors, energy meters — into a unified spatial dashboard used by city operations teams.
Role
Product Manager overseeing the full product lifecycle. Coordinated between the city government stakeholders, a 6-person engineering team, and two third-party sensor integration vendors.
Goals
Reduce average traffic incident response time by 40%. Provide city planners with energy consumption forecasts accurate to within 5%. Create a single pane of glass replacing 6 disconnected monitoring systems.
Constraints
Legacy municipal IT infrastructure with strict data residency requirements. Multiple sensor vendors with incompatible data formats. A 9-month deadline tied to a federal smart city grant expiration.
Process
Conducted 22 stakeholder interviews across 5 city departments in the first month. Built a data normalization layer to unify sensor formats. Ran a 4-week pilot in one district before scaling city-wide. Weekly demos to the mayor's office kept alignment tight.
Key Decisions
Chose a time-series database (TimescaleDB) over a general-purpose store for 10x query performance on sensor data. Implemented edge computing for traffic cameras to reduce bandwidth by 70%. Built modular dashboard widgets so each department could customize their view.
Results
Traffic incident response time decreased by 47%. Energy forecasting hit 96.2% accuracy within 3 months. The platform consolidated 6 legacy systems into one, saving the city $1.2M annually in licensing and maintenance costs.