As a Product Manager, I always pay attention when customers find alternate (or creative) uses of a product. Recently, I came across a fantastic example that perfectly illustrates this point.
A couple of days ago, Category 1 Hurricane Beryl hit the southern coast of Texas, leaving a lot of people stranded without power.
Imagine being in 106-degree heat, anxiously waiting for power to be restored. More than 2 million people were impacted by the outage.
And apparently, CenterPoint Energy, the electric utility company in the affected area, isn’t technically savvy enough to provide users with a power outage map.
So, how did people find out which areas had electricity?
They turned to a burger chain app – Whataburger!
Whataburger is a popular 24×7 burger chain in Texas and a few other southern US states. The mobile app intuitively shows on a map which locations are open and which ones are not.
The locations in orange, Whataburger’s logo color, are open.
The ones in grey are closed. Since it’s a 24×7 open chain, the closed ones are primarily due to power outages.
This unintended use of the Whataburger app highlights a significant opportunity. If a burger chain’s app can be repurposed to serve as a power outage map, imagine the potential if this feature were integrated into mainstream mapping services.
I see a huge opportunity for Google, Apple, and other map companies to add a power outage feature to their apps.
Providing users with real-time information about power availability could be incredibly beneficial during natural disasters and other emergencies. Moreover, this would give them a significant advantage our other map competitors, making the app super sticky and increasing the retention.
Comment if you live in Texas and would benefit from a feature like this!
Original News Source: New York Post
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