Skydio Cloud: Designing enterprise drone fleet software from 0 to 1

Thermal Livestream

Skydio Cloud lets enterprise and government teams manage drone fleets, live operations, missions, media, licensing and 3D data. I was the first design hire, working across drone autonomy, cloud infrastructure, engineering and product.

Problem: Drone programs outgrew the pilot and the controller

Growing programs needed one place to coordinate fleets, stream live video, schedule missions and review 3D data. The challenge was turning highly technical drone workflows into clear software for people working in high-stakes situations.

Research: I embedded in how each customer actually flew

Public safety (Las Vegas PD, Chula Vista PD): Drone as First Responder and Live 911 workflows gave officers aerial context before arriving on scene
Mining (Rio Tinto): Daily orthomosaics to monitor large sites and track change
Rail (BNSF, Union Pacific): Reading container serial numbers and mapping assets in rail yards, reducing manual inspection
Transportation (Salt Lake City DOT, Caltrans): 3D models of mountain highways to find avalanche pressure points and plan safer clearing
Telecom (TELUS, Dish): Enterprise customers running organization-wide fleets

What I designed with engineering

3D in the browser: Cloud model viewing with CesiumJS, deck.gl and Three.js
Real-time control: Obstacle avoidance toggles and run mode switching
System status: Information architecture for reading drone state quickly across video, map, fleet and mission views
Camera modes: Transitions between thermal and visual feeds

Outcome: Hundreds of organizations onboarded

Adoption: Hundreds of organizations onboarded after launch
Revenue: Sold as enterprise SKUs including Cloud Basic and Cloud Live Streaming. I designed the upsell and pricing experiences that helped convert organizations to paid plans