Designing a moonshot

Reflections on one year at a Silicon Valley tech startup

I work at Verdigris, an energy tech startup with a mission to enable connected buildings that are smarter and more sustainable. The company has a strong technical foundation and a wonderful mission, but it wasn’t rooted in serving a customer or market segment. Sound familiar to anyone else working on a moonshot project?

How did we go about taking the first step to realizing that future with smart buildings?

At Verdigris, my then-fellow designer Vikram Babu and I started by listening to potential customers and beta testers in the building operations space.

We visited and interviewed more than a dozen facility managers, general managers, and chief engineers, to learn about their workflow, daily problems, and existing solutions. How do they find out about building problems now? What kind of information do they get? When? How is it useful? How is it not? How do they feel about these solutions? How do they then address these problems?

We found that building operators are busy people who spend the bulk of their time responding to urgent requests and fighting fires. We know they aren’t able to proactively address problems and run their buildings the way they would like to.

But what if their building could talk to them, and tell them about the problems that are about to happen? Imagine if that building could regulate and fix itself! That’s the vision of connected buildings.

We also pooled our internal knowledge through design sprints with our Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service teams. Lastly, we looked at the competitive landscape in the world of building management systems (BMS).

From this research, we found that we could fit into the mental frameworks of building fault detection and diagnostics, predictive maintenance, and BMS setpoints. Navigant Research published a great diagram on next-generation building management systems that strongly influenced our thinking on how we approach the path to our moonshot. I adapted it as such for Verdigris:

We also followed three guiding principles based on insights into the lives of building operators:

1. Mobile First (or at least mobile flexible): building managers and engineers are always on the go.
2. Action Oriented: our customers are busy, they just need to know what to do, so we try to not overwhelm them with excessive data.
3. Just Enough Alerting: email is their preferred method of communication, but these people get pinged all day long. If the same alert comes too often, it will be ignored.

With our course charted, we set about following it through multiple rounds of testing and iterating designs with potential customers and the internal team.

Six months later, we’ve released the resulting product: the Verdigris Energy Tracker, a responsive web application for real-time energy alerts.

Customers set power thresholds (like a BMS setpoint) on the relevant equipment or building system of their choosing. They then receive alerts whenever power exceeds or falls below the threshold, so they can know of new or impending problems before someone else reports it (like FDD and predictive maintenance). We also decided to limit the number of alerts per problem to once an hour, knowing that most building operators wouldn’t have time to respond to a single problem with greater frequency (that whole being busy thing).

For customers who are able to connect their smart meters to our system, Energy Tracker also provides a 24 hour forecast of the building’s power demand and will send an alert if it’s projected to be higher than normal.

It’s a simple starting point: our customers will know when something was left on/off when it shouldn’t have been. But we think it’s the right starting point and moreover, the right platform for getting us to that mission of smart buildings.

In the next iteration of Energy Tracker, we’ll offer a way to automatically create moving setpoints based on machine learning algorithms; Energy Tracker will be able to identify unusual equipment activity on its own, with minimal input from building operators. Communication with building controls are also part of our plans.

It’s our first step on the long path toward realizing a moonshot.