Case Overview
Reimagining Sign-Up to Service for a National Energy Utility
A discovery-led MVP app that hit 300% of its uptake target within days of launch.
INDUSTRY
Utilities — energy retail (commercial & domestic)
SERVICE PROVIDED
Digital Transformation · Product Strategy & Discovery
ENGAGEMENT TYPE
Discovery-led MVP app design and delivery
THE CHALLENGE
A national energy utility serving both commercial and domestic customers had reached a point where its sign-up-to-service journey was held together by workarounds rather than design. Domestic customers switching supplier faced a different process, different forms and different wait times than commercial customers opening an account for a new site, and neither journey had been built with the other in mind. Internal teams had accumulated a long list of feature requests for a future app — self-service meter readings, live chat, loyalty perks, bill prediction tools — but nobody had tested whether customers actually wanted, or would use, any of it. The utility had already watched a previous digital initiative struggle: a portal built largely on internal assumptions about what would look impressive rather than what customers needed, which launched to underwhelming uptake and a quiet backlog of unused features. With a new app in the pipeline and real budget on the table, the risk wasn’t a lack of ambition — it was building the wrong thing well. The utility needed a way to separate genuine customer need from internal wish-list thinking, and to do it fast enough that the first release could still hit its launch window.
THE APPROACH
The engagement began with deliberately broad discovery before any design work started — separate research tracks for commercial and domestic customers, because collapsing them into one persona early would have hidden exactly the differences that mattered. For domestic customers, this meant structured interviews and journey-mapping sessions focused on the emotional and practical friction points of switching supplier. For commercial customers, discovery focused on account complexity: multi-site billing, authorisation levels and who within a business actually manages the utility relationship day to day. Every feature idea already on the internal wish-list was tested against this evidence rather than assumed to be valid. From there, the work moved into defining a first-release scope disciplined enough to say no to good ideas that weren’t yet proven necessary, with close collaboration with the utility’s internal product and engineering teams keeping the scope grounded in delivery reality as well as customer evidence.
THE OUTCOME
Within days of launch, adoption reached 300% of the utility’s internal uptake target — a figure that reflected genuine pent-up need rather than a marketing push. Daily and Monthly Active User numbers held at a high, sustained level well beyond the launch window, a strong signal the app was solving a real, recurring problem. Because the feature set had been validated before development began, the utility avoided shipping functionality that quietly goes unused. This also gave the internal product team a much stronger foundation for what came next, with discovery-first thinking becoming the expected standard for future releases.
The discovery work meant we built exactly what our customers needed — nothing more, nothing less. That discipline is the reason adoption happened immediately instead of over years.
