Managing Government Relations Across 1000+ Locations

The Problem

Start with Why. We’ve all heard it, but sometimes it helps to work backwards. I was assigned a lofty goal as one of my first zero to one products for Tesla’s EHS (Environmental, Health and Safety) organization. After a brief call with the VP of EHS, she told me she wanted to track interactions Tesla has with regulatory bodies across our global operational footprint. 

It made sense. Across over 1,000 locations globally, EHS was the face for ensuring operations were compliant with local labor, environmental, and other laws. However, there was no way to track this information, and as I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again: what isn’t measured can’t be managed. Our VP of EHS at the time knew this as well, and the operational risk was great! Without being in compliance with local laws, operations could be fined, negatively broadcasted, affecting reputation and brand, and even shut down. 

I helped refine the goals to 3 major success criteria: be able to learn from regulatory interactions, track their outcomes, and ensure no mistake is made twice.

The Chicken or the Egg… more like the Process or the Tool!

With no previous process, metrics, tool, or procedure, I was in for an interesting time. I started by assessing current software offerings from Gensuite to see their version of a regulatory tracker tool. While it was flexible, it allowed too much autonomy for the end user causing outcomes to be captured as separate records and no way to have a timeline of the events that occurred leading up to a violation or penalty.

Next, I needed to understand how regulatory interactions happen, so I partnered with EHS Managers in Manufacturing and SSD (Sales, Service, and Delivery) to see what their experience was. I found that EHS Managers can deal with hundreds of regulatory interactions weekly - from phone calls, emails, site visits, letters, etc. and oftentimes 1 issue can have many developments (one example had over 200!) before an outcome is met. Outcomes can range from nothing to an informal action that is a recommendation by the regulator to a full-blown violation ranging millions of dollars or a site shut down. 

One important thing to note is that for SSD locations, regulator visits were often facilitated by Service Managers as EHS was not always on-site, expanding the target audience for the tool.

Realizing the extensive scope of what I was working on, I onboarded the EHS Legal team to get their expertise as well. This partnership would come in handy later on!

With the information gathered, I drafted the first process flow and supplemented it with a procedure. I now called upon 80+ global EHS and operational leaders to review my proposal. Let’s just say what happened next was pretty spicy.

Negative Feedback is Positive Feedback

Definition of Alignment by Google from Oxford Languages

Alignment is touted here and there as a corporate “buzzword” but when you have stakeholders yelling at you, you quickly understand why it’s commonly used.

My initial proposal required all regulatory interactions (emails, phone calls, letters, visits, and mere hello’s) to be input as an record in the system. For EHS Managers who have 100s of interactions weekly, there were major concerns that this would be a huge administrative burden, piling more work on top of an already loaded EHS team. My progress came to a halt.

I had to go back to the drawing board, stat. Circling back to the vision, the VP wanted to track outcomes, more so than the interactions, particularly to prevent negative ones from happening in the future. So, what types of interactions commonly led to negative outcomes? I answered this question with the help of Legal and Senior EHS Managers, who have oversight on historic and current violations and penalties, and proceeded with revisions to my proposal.

Post-revisions, I was able to garner better feedback from EHS teams and approval from the VP; I got the alignment! Recognizing the vagueness of the goal and the lack of anyone else working on this problem, I published the first company-wide procedural document for our newly minted Regulatory Interactions Program. 

North Star + Supporting Metrics

Tesla is a data-driven company. I am a data-driven person. With the goal in mind to reduce negative outcomes from regulatory visits, a new key performance indicator was born: Violation Rate. This would measure the ratio between in-scope interactions and the number of violations for a given location, country, and region. Based on estimates from top performing sites, an initial guideline was set. After all, at Tesla it is expected to set a moonshot goal and if it can't be reached then at least we'll have landed among the stars.

If violations are to occur, then there should be corrective actions to see them resolved. This was the basis for another metric that tracked the creation of actions assigned to these events.

Product Development

With a clear goal in mind after 2 months of back-and-forth, I set off to work with a designer in creating a mockup/prototype. I had drafted user flows based on the personas and outlined the data fields needed to capture key information to calculate metrics and tell a story. 

It’s important to mention that during this product design I corrected the issue with other product offerings. I opted for a more restrictive design where users were forced to link violations or penalties to existing interactions (rather than creating a new record). This is so that the backend data can be linked across different interaction types to tell a story. Users were also guided to create actions for their records which can be assigned appropriately to other employees to track open items from regulators.

Given it was a simple intake form, development was staggered over 2 sprints and accomplished with minimal risk. Getting people to fill it out… now that’s another section in itself!

Inspiring 1000s of Employees to do More Work

Gearing up for launch, I put myself in the shoes of my customers (I started off as an EHS Specialist after all). How could I convince over 1,000 EHS employees and even more SSD personnel to learn about this new process and fill out my form?

This is where my earlier work with EHS Legal would come in handy. EHS Legal had previously created guidelines around what to do before & during regulatory visits. I leveraged existing communication mediums (one-pagers, SharePoint pages, and trainings) adding a section for what to do after (aka fill out my form). The form automatically notified the correct personnel based on business logic and made non-EHS personnel’s jobs easier by doing so.

For EHS employees, I created a one-pager and led over a dozen global and localized trainings, working with on-site teams to customize training based on local regulation and examples. 

Within 6 months, the KPI was adjusted to better reflect current operational state and trended downwards following year indicating our north star goal was being met.

Lessons Learned

During this role, I truly experienced my first product where I had to own the product space as nothing else existed. I brought together 80+ stakeholders to buy-in and align on a process. This was a valuable experience in negotiation and earning trust, as I was working with Senior Leadership teams going off the will of the VP. Both negotiation and earning trust are critical skills to have as a Product Manager to influence without direct authority.

By focusing on the user experience and assessing shortcomings of existing market solutions I was able to invent through simplification and ensure the program's resounding success in monitoring regulatory interactions and reducing negative outcomes.

-Anthony Splendor