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Empower clean energy trading with a new marketplace

LevelTen Energy collaborates with The GC Trading Alliance to help our partners like Google and Microsoft achieve their carbon-free energy goals by providing contract settlement capabilities.

Role

Product design

team

1 product manager
4 engineers

timeline

10+ months
Aug 2023 - Jun 2024

tools

Figma
Confluence
Miro

Context

What are Granular Certificates?

To combat climate change and provide clean, affordable electricity, we need a global push to decarbonize power systems. 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy (CFE) aims to meet electricity demand with carbon-free sources continuously.

Image source: Google. (2022). Operating on 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy by 2030. Google Sustainability.

Organizations can achieve CFE goals through Granular Certificates (GCs), hourly-based renewable energy tracking certificates. While the GC market is emerging, a practical trading product is still lacking.

outcome

Tracking and settlement infrastructure of GC exchange

LevelTen acknowledges the interest of many organizations in participating in the CFE efforts. To facilitate the initial transactions of GCs, we aim to adopt a minimum viable product (MVP) approach. This MVP will allow participants with CFE demand to trade GCs with developers/sellers who have CFE supply.

Press: Bloomberg, GeekWire, LevelTen Energy blog

My design impact

Research

How does the process work?

To figure our where LevelTen can help with the GC trading process, we talked to a few subject matter experts to understand the workflow of acquiring GCs. Here we saw an opportunity in tracking GC delivery and facilitating contract payment and settlement.

User journey map

I conducted a white-boarding session with some members of the product team to outline the high-level customer journeys. This exercise aided us in comprehending the project's scope and identifying any implementation issues.

Seller's key actions

Send GCs to LevelTen's custodian account.

Work with LevelTen if there are issues with the GC delivery.

Confirm payment receipt from buyers.

Buyer's key actions

Monitor seller's schedule on delivering GCs.

Make payment before the deadline.

Confirm the receipt of the correct amount of GCs.

pushback

Rescope the project

We presented the MVP plan and customer journeys to engineering and business stakeholders and faced the following pushbacks:

- Payment integration: There are security concerns about LevelTen accessing customers' bank accounts in such an early phase.
- GC transfer: To streamline GC delivery, LevelTen requires access to users' registry data via an API. It requires a new back-end infrastructure which will be a substantial engineering undertaking.

Feature prioritization

To address the pushbacks, I collaborated with the product and engineering teams to strategize a plan for the MVP release. Eventually, we decided to prioritize the tracking of GC settlement and delivery because:
‍
1. We want engineers to focus on back-end infrastructure first.
2. Based on the journey map, we believe that the most valuable feature we can introduce at this stage is to enhance the transparency of GC transactions, provide timely reminders to users to take necessary actions, and ensure smooth and complete deliveries.

Design decision

Monitor delivery status

To facilitate the delivery of GCs, both sellers and buyers need to go through the same settlement process each month. In order to help them stay on top of upcoming deliveries, transfer GCs, and make timely payments, an organized table would be incredibly useful.

Display delivery detail

Presenting all the metadata related to a delivery in the proper hierarchy can be a challenging task. Without the ability to transfer GCs and make payments on LevelTen, completing a delivery requires a lot of manual work.

Display transaction detail

Similar to the delivery detail page, the data hierarchy is important. It would be helpful to also link all the deliveries associated with the transaction.

Final design

GC delivery workflow

1. After securing the GC auction, sellers and buyers went to LevelTen to view their newly added transaction.

2. When it's time for the GC delivery, sellers receive emails reminding them of the deadline for transferring GCs. Sellers can log on to LevelTen to review the details of the delivery that is due. Additionally, they can view the process of completing a delivery.

3. The call to action button prompts users to take the next step, which is to 'Transfer GCs'. However, it is important to note that this button serves as a confirmation modal for users to confirm that they have taken the action, rather than directly transferring the GCs on LevelTen.

4. Sellers will go to the registry and transfer GCs to LevelTen's custodian account. Once they have completed the transfer, they will return to LevelTen and indicate that they have transferred the GCs. We will update the delivery status while LevelTen verifies the sellers' actions.

5. LevelTen will send a reminder email to buyers, prompting them to pay for the GCs. Buyers can log on to LevelTen to review the details of the upcoming delivery. Buyers are required to send payment from their bank, and they do not need to verify the payment since LevelTen does not have access to buyers' bank accounts.

6. Once buyers have sent the payment and sellers have been notified by their bank, sellers can return to LevelTen to mark the delivery as complete. They can confirm this either through the delivery detail page or the table.

7. After LevelTen transfers the GCs from the custodian account to the sellers' account, we will mark the delivery complete.

Next steps

What should we do next

Gathering user feedback

We are actively conducting interviews with members of the Consortium to make sure the workflow works for everyone.

Implementing features

Engineers are working on integrating with the API of the 3rd part trading platform.

Validating the hypothesis

We can test the accuracy and performance of the MVP and showcase its value to potential investors or partners.

Defining future iterations

Once we have enough engagement data, we can think more on feature enhancements.

Takeaways

What did I learn

It's okay to make hypothesis, that's what MVP is for:  
‍This is my first time working on a 0-1 product. At the beginning of the research, I sometimes felt very lost. How can we be sure this workflow will work? Will users actually use a product that heavily relies on manual processes? We won't know until we test the concept!

Designing in low fidelity can very persuasive:
‍Often, when I present my designs to stakeholders, I always create high-fidelity mockups. However, this time, we involved our stakeholders early in the process and I ended up sharing many of my in-progress wireframes with them. Despite my initial concerns about the low-fidelity design causing confusion, the stakeholders actually enjoyed being part of the design iterations. The wireframes helped stimulate meaningful discussions and feedback.

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