CONTEXT
A handful of reports – and a $15M business model under pressure
Schneider Electric's Resource Advisor launched in 2005 as a simple dashboard with a dropdown of canned reports. Most of the company's energy management work was still happening offline — account managers manually delivering PDFs to clients.
Despite that, the service generated roughly $15M annually. Schneider approached me to help reimagine the platform as a self-service SaaS, with two priorities: empower customers to drive their own analysis, and ship a dynamic reporting engine that could grow without bespoke work.
APPROACH
Discovery before pixels
I led internal workshops, sat with dozens of clients across utilities, manufacturing, and CPG, and trained alongside Schneider's energy analysts. The goal: deeply understand how energy data actually flows through a multinational portfolio, and where the human bottlenecks live.
Through a considerable amount of discovery work, including many iterations of information architectures, wireframes, and usability validation, I designed a new user interface and content structure for the product. Through collaboration with product owners, project managers, and developers, a long-term roadmap was created to realize the vision.
OUTCOME
From a side service to the industry benchmark
Client reception was off the charts and led to consistent positive revenue growth year-over-year for the following 13 years that I was principal product designer. As of 2019, Resource Advisor was the leading energy management and sustainability SaaS solution globally and won numerous industry awards. Clients no longer numbered in the dozens, but into the thousands, and annual revenue exceeded $1 billion*.
* Reference (Schneider Electric 2019 Annual Report - Energy Management Revenue)
