Software Layer for Industrial-Scale Batteries

A global industrial conglomerate saw declining margins in battery hardware and wanted to explore whether a software platform could capture more value from their installed base. 2-month sprint across San Francisco and Sydney.

78 interviews across 5 markets

16-person team across 2 continents

20+ solution concepts tested

Strategy internalized

The Ask

The client saw declining margins in battery hardware and wanted to explore whether a software platform, potentially energy trading, could capture more value from their installed base. Led and coached a 16-person venture team across San Francisco and Sydney through a 2-month sprint with a hypothesis to validate.

Target Customers

Utility companies and commercial/industrial battery owners across Australia, UK, Germany, California, and Texas. Two segments: utilities (with and without existing battery storage) and DER asset owners operating systems over 100kW.

What We Did

78 interviews across two customer segments spanning five markets. Moved from pain point interviews to storyboard testing, presenting 20+ solution concepts across themes like forecasting, market participation, interoperability, and reliability. Each storyboard was scored on Net Promoter Score, pain intensity, and relative priority against other problems in the customer's world.

Key Insight

The initial hypothesis assumed software could unlock value from batteries already in the ground. Discovery revealed a more fundamental blocker. Customer needs mapped to adoption maturity: utilities in regulated markets, early-stage DER owners, and aggregators all described different pain points not because they faced different technical problems, but because they sat at different points on the adoption curve. What looked like market fragmentation was actually temporal segmentation. The Virtual Power Plant and trading markets sized at $2 to 5B by 2025: meaningful, but not transformational. And battery ownership remained prohibitively expensive for most potential customers. The most validated value propositions (asset tracking, forecasting, optimization) only mattered to customers who had already made the leap to ownership.

Recommendation

Focus upstream first: enable battery acquisition through financing structures, risk-sharing models, or as-a-service offerings. Only then would the downstream software opportunity scale. This flipped the original hypothesis. The client had assumed existing hardware was the foundation for software value. Discovery showed the foundation didn't yet exist at scale.

Outcome

Strategy internalized; reshaped the business unit's approach to market entry.

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