PICLO
SERVICE DESIGN │ B2B │ ENERGY
National Grid Market Integration
Within a few months Piclo needed to integrate with the National Grid Electricity Distribution’s trading platform so that users could trade in a brand new market whilst enjoying the user experience of Piclo.
I designed the service from the ground up, working closely with engineering and customer success colleagues to ensure end-to-end feasibility. I pinpointed scaling thresholds so that we could start small, learn fast and ramp up confidently.
Defining a North Star
I came in to a product team that was overwhelmed by the scope of the integration. Although they were doing great work already they wasn't a clear end goal in sight. This lack of visibility made it hard to determine where we were heading, what actually needed to be done and in what sequence it should be undertaken.
My first task was to pull all of the threads together, based upon work already in flight, technical specifications of the target system and an understanding of the organisational objectives. I created a robust service blueprint that was able to convey how the differing parties had to work together, not just technically. This allowed us to create shared consensus within the team and across the business and to hone in on critical touchpoints.
Determining an MVP
Now that we understood the broad jobs we had to enable we could also start to understand early scaling concerns. Our integration had to be robust, but it was essential we started in the right places given the time and capacity constraint.
I facilitated multiple workshops to understand which parts of the service needed to be automated once we go from 0-1. This gave us real focus, and allowed me to quickly work out concierge operating procedures for lower priority tasks. I looped in our customer success team to handoff certain procedures, giving the product team a lot more headroom to build the core technical groundwork.
Throughout this process I ran weekly requirements gathering and review sessions with the client NGED. I built great rapport with their team, allowing us to compromise where needed and even open up a feedback channel where we could ask them to make changes that would make both systems more robust and user friendly.
The rollout of the service was extremely successful. The product and customer success teams worked very well together to give customers a seamless experience.
Assessing Maturity
As this integration was the first of its kind at Piclo I wanted to keep reassessing whether our overarching architecture was mature enough for the future. I ran holistic design review sessions with the engineers to discuss more fundamental technical pieces, such as microservice connections, object models, API schemas and the use of queues. This allowed us to zoom out and ensure our integration wasn't just serving one target system but could be adequately rolled out again and again.
Outlining a Vision
My work designing this service gave senior management the confidence to put me in charge of pulling together a product vision for the company. This involved gathering vision, and strategy, detail from across the organisation to create a set of artefacts that we could rally around as a business.
I built and maintained journey maps of varying levels of abstraction to show which jobs we needed to be catering to, and also more visionary design prototypes that allowed us to all speak the same language when discussing how the product had to evolve within the next 1-5 years.
