Leading the strategic design and market validation of a disruptive app for Shell Technology Ventures
Using strategic design tools and techniques to identify market opportunities and assess product desirability.
BCG Digital Ventures is a global corporate venture firm that invent, build, scale and invest in startups with the world’s most influential companies.
I joined one of their new venture as a Lead Strategic Designer in 2016 to help them launch a new product backed by Shell Technology Ventures.
The challenge
Shell is heavily investing in innovative and disruptive technologies that could compliment their core business and with the energy market undertaking major transformations, Shell approached BCG Digital Ventures to help them diversify their portfolio with a new business initiative.
Following an initial consultation that saw more than a hundred ideas being assessed and evaluated by Shell and BCG DV senior managers, decision was made to move forward with what would become Wonderbill. The general idea was to build an online comparison tool that could help customers find better energy deals. BCG DV was in charge of finding the best strategy to deliver a unique product which could disrupt an already crowded market and promote Shell’s own energies.
Uncovering strategic insights
The team first focused its efforts on trying to understand user needs, behaviours and attitudes towards online comparison services. Initial rounds of research were conducted in Austin and London with potential customers to gauge their appetite for a product like Wonderbill.
At the heart of Wonderbill was the idea that we would help customers who were in the process of moving home, transfer their bills and make the switch to new suppliers if there were better deals locally. When we tested this concept with consumers it became clear that what people primarily wanted was to have all their bills in one place and then be notified when there were better deals on the market. Help with transferring bills to a new property was an after-thought for them. We had to go back to the drawing board and refine the value proposition so that it would resonate better with consumers and solve important problems for them.
In parallel, the team also investigated the current comparison app landscape to make sure we had a unique selling point and an edge in terms of value proposition. This piece of work highlighted the fact that most competitors were focusing on comparing energy deals. There was a real business opportunity to extend our comparison tool to a wider range of bills customers usually deal with including mobile phone contracts, gym memberships and streaming services like Amazon or Netflix.
Testing early prototypes with consumers
The teaAs the Lead Strategic Designer on the project I was reporting consumer insights on a weekly basis to the team. The team would then work on further iterations of the product so it could better answer some of the comparison market’s shortfalls. Gradually, Wonderbill was moving towards a one-stop-shop where customers have all their bills in one place, have an easy way to visualise services’ usage and a comparison tool to lower their bills.
With a more robust value proposition in place the team was able to move to the next phase of the incubation and we started looking at more granular elements of the product: Shell branding was removed after consumer research showed that the presence of the energy giant on the product often led people to think that Wonderbill would be biased in terms of results. The name of the product was changed from Onebill to Wonderbill and in parallel front-end and back-end developers started laying out core sections of the app.
The feedback we got from testing early prototypes was very positive and there was a sense of solving some important problems people had when managing bills.
What we’ve achieved
Moving at a fast pace, the multi-disciplinary team that BCG DV had put together for this project released the Wonderbill app just a few months after Shell had signed-off the project.
Wonderbill is now a well established player in its market with some unique and innovative features. In 2020 the app had been downloaded more than 300,000 times and Wonderbill is helping customers keep track of £500m worth of bills each year.
