Originally published on my LinkedIn on September 2025.
Eight years ago, I set out to solve what seemed like a simple problem: help people move around cities better. The vision was clear: integrate all modes of transport into one seamless platform, reduce car dependency, and nudge cities toward sustainability. We called it Meep and we envisioned what we understand now as an AI agent for our daily mobility needs. What I didn’t anticipate was that this noble mission would teach me one of the most profound lessons about orchestrating complex ecosystems: sometimes the smallest adjustments create the biggest transformations.
The Deceptively Simple Vision of Mobility
The Mobility as a Service idea behind Meep, at its core, is about orchestration. The idea in the beginning was improving all kinds of city trips. We were convinced that the “familiarized” commutes were inefficient—people stuck in routines, taking the same route every day without considering better alternatives or real-time information about the state of the service. Imagine having one app that shows you every option: bus, metro, bike-share, e-scooter, taxi, with real-time information, seamless booking, and unified payment. Not only frictionless movement, but also a tool that books for you in advance, modifies your journey when there’s an unexpected delay, or changes modes in case of disruptions.
The concept sounds straightforward, almost obvious. But as we discovered at Meep while deploying our software across cities, the execution is anything but simple. What looks like a software challenge is actually an ecosystem orchestration problem of staggering complexity.
The Web We Had to Untangle
Deploying a MaaS platform means navigating a maze of stakeholders, each with their own priorities, legacy systems, and regulatory constraints. Picture this: public transit agencies focused on cost optimization within tight city budgets while serving passenger needs, private operators balancing compliance requirements with opportunities for operational efficiency and competitive advantage, city officials seeking solutions that deliver visible community benefits within political cycles, and payment providers managing data security and regulatory compliance in highly controlled environments.
Then add the technical realities: most players lack standardized protocols or use outdated versions because upgrading requires investment and specialized talent they often don’t have in-house. Each transport operator becomes an API battle, with obsolete technology in public administration and legacy-minded teams demanding old-school development approaches. Tech teams invariably prioritize immediate fires and incidents over long-term connectivity improvements, making it nearly impossible to align development roadmaps across organizations with fundamentally different objectives. The complexity isn’t just technical—it requires a completely different mindset, less economically driven and more creatively focused on finding unconventional solutions.
After our first few deployments, I realized we weren’t just building software. We were conducting a symphony where half the musicians spoke different languages and the other half were reading from different sheet music.
The Trim tab Effect: How Small Adjustments Steer Massive Systems
It was during our deployment in Malta, working with Malta Public Transport, that I first encountered Buckminster Fuller’s concept of the trim tab, and everything clicked. Fuller described how massive ships are steered not by turning the main rudder directly (that would require enormous force) but by adjusting a tiny flap called a trim tab on the rudder’s edge. This small movement shifts the water pressure, which moves the rudder, which turns the ship. The tiniest adjustment at the right point can redirect an entire vessel.
This became my mental model for Meep deployment. Mobility ecosystems, and cities by extension, are like massive ships: too large and complex to change through brute force. But if you can identify the trim tabs (those small leverage points where minimal intervention creates maximum impact) you can guide the entire system toward transformation.
Our deployment process evolved into a careful choreography of finding these trim tabs. We’d start with deep research, mapping not just the technical landscape but the political and economic incentives of each player. We’d test the public transport ourselves, try ride-hailing services, check fares across different modes, identify corner cases in validation systems, and follow actual daily commute routines. We’d talk to passengers waiting at bus stops, understand the incentives driving vendors with active contracts, and map how each transport mode really worked in practice.
Once we gathered all this information and truly understood the system, we realized that sometimes minor changes could make a huge impact: real-time information that was already available but not shared, route deviation notifications that could prevent passenger frustration, different validation systems that could reduce boarding times, cross-selling offers between two complementary modes, new payment options that eliminated friction, or even a different fare structure that could increase ridership. When we had this diagnosis, we’d pitch the specific idea to the player who could make that change possible and start building from there. This wasn’t about grand contracts or system overhauls—it was about identifying which small lever, when pulled, would create the momentum for everything else to follow.
The technology phase involved building integration layers that could speak to legacy systems while preparing for future standards. But the real work happened during operations: running pilots, gathering feedback, and making hundreds of micro-adjustments based on real-world usage. Each deployment taught us that transformation happens not through grand gestures but through persistent, strategic nudges at the right pressure points.
Finding the Right Pressure Points
In practice, these trim tabs revealed themselves in unexpected places. In Malta, implementing real-time ETA for buses and notifications about route deviations became the key to user engagement, dramatically increasing the Net Promoter Score of the entire service. This wasn’t just about technology—it was about rebuilding trust between passengers and public transport.
In Zaragoza, the trim tab was creating a connection between bus, tram, and taxi for the first time in the city’s history. This single integration unlocked multimodal thinking among residents and operators alike, changing how people perceived urban mobility from separate services to one cohesive system.
In Sevilla, success came from connecting kick-scooter users with the metro system through a unified payment method—our NFC Meep virtual card that enabled cross-benefits between both services. Users could seamlessly transition from metro to scooter with integrated pricing and rewards, creating new mobility patterns that neither operator could achieve alone.
In Madrid, the trim tab was connecting the entire ecosystem into a single backend for the operator, allowing them to see their service as part of a larger mobility picture rather than an isolated transport mode. This backend integration became the foundation for data-driven decisions that improved the entire network’s performance.
Orchestration, Not Control
These experiences taught me that leading ecosystem transformation is fundamentally different from traditional management. You can’t control all the variables, mandate all the changes, or force all the adoptions. Instead, you must identify where small, strategic interventions can create cascading positive effects. We saw firsthand that if you can showcase how these suggested small changes make a real impact for your client, they become much more willing to commit to further innovation improvements with your software. Success with one trim tab builds confidence for the next, creating a momentum that traditional big-bang approaches rarely achieve.
Great ecosystem orchestrators don’t push harder: they push smarter. They find the pressure points where minimal effort yields maximum alignment. They understand that in complex systems, indirect influence often works better than direct force.
This insight transformed how we approached every deployment. Instead of trying to integrate everyone at once, we focused on finding the right first domino. Instead of building every feature immediately, we identified which capabilities would create the most momentum for others to follow. This approach also helped us become more cost-efficient and competitive against larger integrators with bigger budgets who often opted for brute-force approaches. While they would try to overwhelm the system with resources, we could achieve better results by finding the right leverage points and working with the ecosystem’s natural dynamics rather than against them.
Beyond Mobility: The Universal Application
The trim tab principle extends far beyond mobility into any complex problem-solving scenario. In organizational transformation, the trim tab might be changing one key performance metric that realigns everyone’s incentives. In digital transformation, it could be implementing one process that demonstrates value and builds confidence for larger changes. When facing complex problems—whether they’re technical, organizational, or systemic—the instinct is often to attack them head-on with comprehensive solutions. But complex problems rarely yield to direct assault.
Large, disruptive moves often trigger immune responses in established systems. But smaller, strategic adjustments (better communication protocols, new incentive structures, successful pilot programs) can ripple through organizations in ways that massive reorganizations cannot. Consider how Seed Savers Exchange didn’t try to revolutionize agriculture overnight—they started in 1975 with just thirty gardeners sharing seeds on a six-page list. This small trim tab of connecting passionate gardeners allowed them to build a network that eventually grew to over 13,000 members worldwide, preserving more than 20,000 endangered seed varieties and fundamentally changing how we think about agricultural biodiversity.
Whether you’re orchestrating a mobility ecosystem, leading a corporate transformation, or building a startup, the principle remains: identify the leverage points where small changes create system-wide shifts. Complex problems require patient, strategic intervention at the right pressure points rather than brute force applied to the entire system.
The Enduring Lesson from Eight Years of Building Meep
Working in mobility as a service showed me that meaningful transformation is less about heroic, sweeping reforms and more about strategic patience: knowing where to apply pressure and when to wait for the system to respond. It’s often frustrating work. Progress can seem invisible for months, then suddenly accelerate as multiple trim tabs align.
But when it works (when you see happier passengers, less time spent waiting for the bus, more efficient trips, better NPS overall, and collaboration among competitors) the impact is profound. We’ve facilitated over 88 million qualified interactions across our platforms, connecting more than 175 operators, and displacing countless private car trips.
The work taught me humility about the complexity of systemic change, but also confidence in the power of strategic intervention. Our original mission (improving quality of life in cities through smarter, more sustainable mobility) remains as relevant as ever. But the path to achieving it has taught me something unexpected: the most effective way to orchestrate complex ecosystems is not through force or grand vision alone, but through identifying and adjusting the small leverage points that guide larger transformations.
In the end, building Meep taught me that the best way to move cities forward is not to force the wheel, but to adjust the trim tabs. The smallest changes, applied at the right pressure points, can redirect entire systems toward a better future.