AVWA · Strategic Vision

The starting point

A private car sits parked in the garage roughly 80% of the day. I had that number in mind when I started looking at urban mobility not as a traffic problem but as an idle-asset problem. The city does not necessarily need more cars on the road, it needs the cars that were already manufactured to be used better. That shift in focus, from producing to reactivating, is where the AVWA vision began.

The math behind the discomfort is easy to run. In Brazil, the cheapest new car cost around R$ 60 thousand, plus another R$ 10 to 12 thousand a year just in maintenance. At the same time, half of Brazilian households lived on a monthly income near R$ 2,900, and the responsible spending guideline for a private car sat around R$ 290, ten percent of that income. The numbers do not add up for most people. Owning a car in Brazil is expensive, exclusionary and, on top of that, inefficient, because the most valuable asset in the house sits idle almost all the time.

The challenge

My role in this stage was to answer a strategy question before any screen: how do you make sharing private cars practical, smart and safe enough to be worth it both for people without a car and for people with one sitting idle? I needed to leave this phase with a defensible product vision, a measurable objective and a set of pillars to steer every decision that followed in research, service and interface.

Why circular economy

The most obvious way out of the transport problem would be to stimulate more consumption, finance more cars, sell more units. Circular economy proposes the opposite: extract the most value from what already exists before producing anything new. I applied that lens to mobility and the car stopped being a product to be sold and became an asset to be shared. Instead of competing for who buys the next vehicle, AVWA competes for the idle time of the vehicles already parked in garages. That framing choice is what set AVWA apart from being just another convenience app and positioned it as a product with economic and environmental impact.

The strategic vision

With the lens set, I translated intent into a concrete north star. The vision I wrote for the product was to create a carsharing app capable of taking 10 thousand users to complete 30 thousand trips by the end of 2025. A number aligns the team and holds the strategy accountable; without one, vision turns into a speech.

From that north star I defined the pillars the product had to hold up. Practicality, because sharing a car cannot be more work than taking your own. Safety and trust, because the biggest barrier of the peer-to-peer model is handing your asset to a stranger, and that is solved with ratings, insurance and inspection, not with goodwill. Financial accessibility, because the product only serves its social purpose if it fits the budget of the people currently priced out of a car. And the credibility of a brand, in this case Volkswagen, able to back a cultural shift that smaller players tried and could not sustain on their own.

The business model chosen to serve that vision was P2P, people renting cars from other people. It solves both sides of the same equation: it gives access to people without a car and turns an owner's idle vehicle into a source of income. The argument fit in one sentence I used as the compass for the whole project: your car can pay for itself.

Process and role

I worked solo in this stage, organizing the strategy across four fronts:

1. Economic framing of the problem. I gathered and crossed the data on ownership cost, income and idleness that underpins the thesis, to make sure the vision was born from public evidence and not intuition. That framing is what answers why the product deserves to exist.
2. Vision and objective. I turned the opportunity into a north-star statement with a measurable target, 10 thousand users and 30 thousand trips by 2025, and derived from it the pillars of practicality, trust, accessibility and brand.
3. Strategic modeling. I structured the proposal in a Business Model Canvas and a Value Proposition Canvas to check whether the value promised to each side, driver and owner, held up under the P2P model. I drew the two core personas, the driver without a car and the owner willing to share theirs, and used a Pixar-format storytelling script to pressure-test the service narrative against real usage.
4. Prioritizing the bets. I placed six solution alternatives in an impact versus effort matrix to decide where to invest first. The highest-return ones mapped straight onto the model's most fragile pillars: strengthening trust with ratings and insurance, offering financial protection against damage, and simplifying the rental process. Prioritization kept the strategy from becoming a wish list and turned it into a plan with an order.

What this stage delivered

The outcome of this stage was not an interface, it was the product's strategic foundation. I left it with the economic thesis that justifies AVWA, a vision with a clear target, the pillars that anchor every decision that follows, the P2P business model validated in the canvases, and a prioritization pointing to where to begin. That set is what the quantitative research and service conception stages inherited to move forward on evidence rather than opinion.

The reframing was the most important delivery. The car stopped being a consumer good you buy and became an asset that circulates, generates income and widens access. Every piece of product logic that came later, from screens to service, rests on that shift in meaning defined here.

What I learned

1. Strategy is choosing the right question. AVWA only stood up when I stopped asking how to make car rental easier and started asking how to make an expensive, idle asset circulate. The circular economy lens was not rhetorical decoration, it is what changed the entire business model.
2. Vision without a number is a wish. Writing the target of 10 thousand users and 30 thousand trips gave the project a criterion to say no. Without it, every feature looked important and prioritization would have had no anchor.
3. Prioritization is where strategy meets reality. The impact versus effort matrix forced me to admit that trust and financial protection were worth more than any flashy feature. It was the least glamorous bets that held up the value proposition.
4. Today I would test the thesis sooner. The vision was born robust in the analysis, but today, with a Product Designer's eye and AI as a tool to speed up synthesis and scenarios, I would confront those hypotheses with real people faster. That was exactly the job of the quantitative stage that followed, and the lesson of shortening the distance between strategy and evidence stuck with everything I designed after it.