Transit products accountable to the least-served rider

I am the chief product officer of Halvery Transit Systems Inc., a fictional Winnipeg company that builds the software Canadian public transit agencies use to collect fares, tell riders when the bus is coming and book specialised transit for people who cannot use a fixed route. Forty-nine agencies in eight provinces and Yukon run at least one of our three products. In 2025 our fare platform processed about 420 million taps, our trip-planning app had 1.7 million monthly users in English and French, and our booking system scheduled 2.6 million door-to-door trips. Revenue was C$164 million.

Our customers are public bodies. They buy through open competitions, answer to councils and provincial ministries, publish their decisions, and carry accessibility, official-language and privacy duties that a consumer app can treat as optional. I have stood on both sides of that relationship. I spent nine years inside two agencies, first planning routes in Saskatchewan and then running rider information for a bilingual commission in eastern Ontario, before joining a Toronto scheduling-software vendor and then a Montréal car-sharing operator. I came to Halvery in 2015 and have led its product organisation since April 2019.

The decisions I am asked about most often cost us money first. I held a fare launch for eleven months because our validators had not survived a prairie January. I made French and English ship in the same release or not at all. I moved our fare contracts off a percentage of fare revenue so that free fares for children and fare capping would never reduce our income. In each case the agency signed the contract, but a rider would live with the result, and I wanted the product to answer to that rider.

Current focus

I am preparing our board's decision on extending the fare platform to regional and intercity operators, where agencies want one rider account across several services and the privacy questions multiply. Alongside it, I am rewriting our product requirements so that each feature describes its behaviour with no network, with a frozen screen and with a screen reader before it describes a good day.

Conversations I welcome

I am not looking to leave Halvery. With our board's consent, I would consider one independent directorship at a Canadian organisation where software carries a public obligation: a provincial Crown corporation, a listed transportation or infrastructure-services company, or a privately held company serving public-sector customers that neither competes with Halvery nor sells to it. Twenty-four days a year is what I can honestly commit alongside my role. I also accept a few invitations to speak to transit, accessibility and public-procurement audiences.