Designing Cities That Move Better

Leo Fernandez on product thinking, equitable mobility, and building transportation for real life
By Elite 100 Editorial

“Mobility isn’t about moving faster—it’s about moving smarter.”
— Leo Fernandez

Elite 100: Leo, urban mobility touches millions of lives daily. How do you define meaningful progress in this space?

Leo Fernandez: Meaningful progress improves reliability and access. It’s not just about speed or new features. It’s about whether people can get where they need to go consistently, affordably, and safely. If a solution works only for a narrow group, it hasn’t solved the real problem.

Elite 100: What drew you to product management within urban mobility?

Leo Fernandez: The scale of impact. Small product decisions can affect entire neighborhoods. Product management sits at the intersection of user behavior, infrastructure constraints, and policy realities, which makes the work both challenging and consequential.

“In cities, small decisions compound quickly.”

Elite 100: How do you balance innovation with the constraints of legacy infrastructure?

Leo Fernandez: By designing within reality rather than around it. Cities can’t be rebuilt overnight. Effective products integrate with existing systems while gradually improving outcomes. Innovation should reduce friction, not introduce new complexity.

Elite 100: What’s the most common mistake teams make when building mobility products?

Leo Fernandez: Designing for ideal users instead of real ones. Urban environments are messy. Products must work for edge cases, peak hours, and imperfect conditions. If a solution only works in demos, it won’t survive daily use.

Elite 100: Data plays a big role in mobility decisions. How do you use it responsibly?

Leo Fernandez: Data should inform priorities, not override lived experience. Quantitative insights help identify patterns, but qualitative feedback explains why those patterns exist. Responsible product decisions combine both.

“Data shows what’s happening. People explain why.”

Elite 100: How do equity and accessibility factor into your product decisions?

Leo Fernandez: They’re foundational. Mobility determines access to work, education, and healthcare. Products that ignore affordability or accessibility unintentionally widen gaps. Inclusive design leads to stronger systems overall.

Elite 100: How do you measure success for a mobility product?

Leo Fernandez: Through reliability and adoption. If people choose the product consistently and it performs under pressure, it’s doing its job. Vanity metrics matter less than real-world usage.

“If people trust it during rush hour, it works.”

Elite 100: How do policy and regulation influence your work?

Leo Fernandez: Significantly. Mobility products operate within public systems. Understanding policy early helps teams build compliant, scalable solutions instead of retrofitting later.

Elite 100: What advice would you give young innovators entering urban mobility?

Leo Fernandez: Spend time in the field. Ride the systems, talk to users, observe pain points firsthand. Cities can’t be understood from dashboards alone.

Elite 100: Final question—how do you personally define success as a young innovator?

Leo Fernandez: Success is usability at scale. When a product quietly improves daily routines for thousands of people, that’s meaningful impact.

“True innovation is when cities work a little better every day.”