Energy Flexibility - Cloud Services

Easee is the largest EV charger platform for Homes & MDUs in Europe. Easee is B2B2C, their partners connects to the Easee cloud (AWS) through Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) to have access to the EV Chargers to build digital products and services.

+700k Chargers Installed

+100 B2B Partners Integrated

Company site

The Challenge

Easee faces a recurring cost challenge: as charger sales increase, so do cloud costs when chargers are connect to easee's back-end rather than through their partners. This issue becomes significant at scale. To address it, a dedicated team was formed to explore monetization opportunities for the cloud infrastructure.

Role overview

Product Trio

Worked with a Product Manager and Tech Lead to spearhead the initiative to tackle the recurring cloud cost problem. Coached a jr. designer and led sync sessions with C-Level Executives.

Discover

We clustered the markets that Easee sells according to regulations and similar purchasing behaviours for EV chargers in large sites:

NORDICS (Norway, Sweden, and Denmark)
BENELUX (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg)
DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland)
UK

10 Research Interviews

4 Workshops

2 Leadership Reports

Collaborating with Data Scientists and Developers

Based on the research, the team guided data scientists in creating Tableau dashboards to capture charger energy flow (monthly, daily, hourly) and flex trade on the energy market to project the market potential for the energy flexibility service through the cloud.

These dashboards helped leadership understand the value we could offer other companies and assess the available volume for monetization through power grid demand and response services.

Value proposition & Business plan

The value proposition for the energy flexibility service was structured concisely into two parts:

Flexing EV Chargers operated by Easee.
Flexing EV Charges operated by Easee Integrated Partners.

Reporting to Leadership through storytelling

Storytelling is crucial for presentations because it transforms complex information into a compelling, memorable narrative.

This presentation highlighted the blockers and dead ends we encountered on certain strategic paths during the design sprint. Using data, we showcased potential revenue in the most promising directions. Finally, we offered a recommendation that led leadership and the sales team to revisit contracts and address the scaling cloud costs.

Outcome & Imapct

Easee revisit existing contracts. The team met the biggest integrated partner that had over 100k chargers connected and was costing more than 50k usd a month on infrastructure and cloud costs.
- The new contract served as a reference to other integrated partners on how to connect and pay for easee cloud services and offset +1 Million dollars in cloud costs.
Easee offered connection via local OCPP to partners that didn't want to pay for the cloud services.
- By offering an alternative, companies would pay for their back-end provider and LTE connection and have full autonomy on the hardware Easee provided.
The company shift towards the Idea 2 presented - "Scaling through Partners".
- The team revamped existing B2B products and offered for free to partners that were willing to pay for cloud solutions, this strategy reduce integrated partners on Easee internal customer support team thus reducing Easee operational costs and support tickets.

References from this project

Stian Oien - Head of Product
"Paul is a really dedicated product designer and UX researcher. Paul is notorious in his methods for discovery work and seeking validation. He always presented his findings and recommendations in a structured, fun and engaging manner. Paul is a team player and was wanted by many of the product squads within Easee. I really hope our paths will cross again sometime in the future

Afonso Malo Franco - Product Director
"Paul is one of the most talented designers I’ve worked with when it comes to dissecting complexity. He has this superpower of taking anything that is complex and unstructured - and transform it into something beautifully simple. It’s very impressive.

But that’s just one of many skills Paul has. He’s an incredibly versatile designer, excellent communication skills, great business understanding (which makes him consider business needs when he designs), and a really nice and fun person to work with. He’s an excellent designer, and I really hope I’ll get the chance to work with him again!"