From zero to sixty, how the tech stack supports hockey-stick acceleration at ChargePoint

With Sasan Vossoughi, CIO of ChargePoint

Electric vehicles used to be a boutique market, but as more and more car makers have put out affordable electric options — Tesla, BMW, Nissan, Chevrolet, Ford, Volkswagen and Kia among them — the market has seen tremendous growth in recent years. Today, as we drive past shopping centers and downtown commercial strips, we’re sure to pass at least a handful of EV charging stations, and plenty of us pull in. As a culture, we’re starting to reimagine transportation, with EV cars and the “fleetification” of transportation as critical elements in modern urban design.

ChargePoint is a startup driven by (and driving) this exhilarating and swiftly progressing market. Helping consumers and businesses make the switch to electric, the company is rapidly building the world’s largest seamless, interconnected charging experience to make it easier and more convenient for vehicle owners to charge their EV vehicles everywhere — a critical factor in making EV ownership efficient. “The days of us stopping at a gas station to charge are being transformed to charging our cars where we park,” says Sasan Vossoughi, CIO of ChargePoint. “It’s a change in behavior and a change for the better in our environment.”

For ChargePoint, having an intelligent network is considered a competitive advantage. Only ten years old but in a leadership role in the EV charging field, ChargePoint is now experiencing a hockey-stick growth. Vossoughi knows that it must be supported by an integrated tech stack to enable today’s generation of workers, constantly evolving internal processes and a global footprint.

Building a smooth employee experience with best-of-breed tools

In the early days, with the whole company in a single office, unified collaboration tools weren’t seen as critical because colleagues could walk up to each other’s desks to chat. But as ChargePoint grew into a bigger corporate campus with multiple buildings and international offices, all of these different, sometimes redundant and hard-to-control systems became a hindrance to collaboration and productivity.

When Vossoughi came in, IT and content management were fragmented across the company. “We were in an environment where each group was doing something different,” he explains. “Some people were using Dropbox, some were using file servers, and some were using Box. There was a lot of content scattered about on laptops on hard drives, and users were complaining they couldn’t find things.”

With employees scattered across the globe, Vossoughi says, “I’ve had to think about how to ensure that the culture of collaboration that we had stayed intact, and support it with tools and a vision. You need to put different pieces of the foundation in place in order to build a way for employees to collaborate easily.” ChargePoint’s CEO had asked Vossoughi to look at eliminating hard drives on all employee laptops and find a secure, centralized solution for content collaboration. ChargePoint uses Office 365, so OneDrive was one potential option for content management. But as Vossoughi says, “I haven’t found anybody who says ‘We have to have OneDrive.’ It has a lot of limitations. It works mostly with Microsoft products, and that’s not how business works today. Instead of improving our collaboration, it compartmentalizes our content into silos, and then we end up with the same fragmentation problem.”

By providing a central, secure content layer, Box was the intelligent solution for collaboration around documents and smoother processes. Now, employees can work out of the various services they’re already used to across ChargePoint’s best-of-breed tech stack with Box as a unified content layer. He explains, “Within an application, you don’t have to come out of the application, you can just access content in Box from there. You’re not sacrificing user experience.”

He has introduced Slack for casual communication and Jira for project management, and he’s now looking to integrate Netsuite and Salesforce with Box so that all content will live on a single platform, along with Workplace by Facebook as an employee intranet. Box, as the centralized content platform, will reduce the risks inherent in using multiple cloud-based apps, and tools such as Netskope will help by monitoring potential unauthorized access.

ChargePoint is still a relatively small company, and that’s why Vossoughi thinks it’s so important to make pivotal technology decisions now. “I have to tackle this when we’re at 500 people instead of when we’re at 2,000 people,” he explains. “Going after this problem early and knocking it out of the way will help set the collaboration culture and behavior we need to allow ChargePoint to scale without compromising efficiency.

“My advice to people would be, most companies don’t deal with unstructured content until later in their lifecycle. And to me, that’s one of the biggest mistakes.”

— Sasan Vossoughi, CIO, ChargePoint

Building adoption of new digital processes by empowering users

At ChargePoint, technology is considered a competitive advantage. Beyond the ROI it provides by eliminating expensive servers and increasing productivity, Box enables workflows that support what employees need to get done. Seventy percent of the content sharing at ChargePoint involves unstructured content, so a platform that supports it well is critical, and so is giving employees a way to design and control their processes. Add to that the fact that the company needs to be able to collaborate globally in a seamless manner, and a platform that supports content management and scalability is critical.

Still, Vossoughi believes in a staged implementation strategy that’s well-paced, rolling out any new technology in such a way that the basics are done right, and advanced capabilities added later. “We decided to walk before running,” Vossoughi says. “People were chomping at the bit for workflows. We said, let’s start with Box and then get to advanced functions like retention and workflows.”

Prior technology solutions had been frustrating to different groups and holding up projects. The legal team, for instance, had put in place a contract management system, but within nine months they were ready to pull the plug because it was too hard to use. Vossoughi’s team demoed for them how easy it was to create and use workflows on Box — including eSignature capability — and they got excited.

“We’re an IT organization in the age of participation, we need an easy-to-use user experience to collaborate and communicate on the cloud, but can’t sacrifice security, identity, privacy, storage, computing power and speed,” Vossoughi says.

Vossoughi’s leadership style is to make decisions with inclusion, making sure to consult with groups on how specific technology solutions might best support them. He describes his initial actions at ChargePoint: “We started out with a bunch of meetings with different groups, letting them talk about their needs and share the issues they’re dealing with today. We did that with marketing, sales, operations, legal, finance, engineering, etc.”

He’s a big fan of the “show and tell” method of inspiring adoption: “By showing them the tool, we really were able to get people to say, okay, when can we get it?” He knew that asking workers to switch tools would improve workflows, but would also require a certain amount of effort — for instance, in cleaning up files before the switch — so he paced the change accordingly to make the transition smooth.

Apart from the legal team, the marketing team is another group at ChargePoint that’s enthusiastic about using Box and, eventually, Box Skills. “They have so much digital content,” says Vossoughi, “and now they’ll be able to find and tag it more easily. The future of AI is going to be a blessing in the sky for them.”

Security and governance can’t wait: Why you should start conversations around both early on

As a leader in an industry still being defined, and a company that partners with manufacturers and enterprise partners on an international scale, ChargePoint does a lot of work around compliance issues, cooperating with government agencies frequently. Being able to share and collaborate on content securely in the cloud makes that kind of work much easier.

“One of the biggest reasons for us to go after Box was because of Box being the most secure content management software out there. That helps me sleep better at night.”

— Sasan Vossoughi

Vossoughi works closely with ChargePoint’s legal team and his CISO to enact specific governance policies and institute information classification. “Those discussions started early,” he says. “Our initial conversations with Box around governance really helped us put together these policies and realize what we need to do.”

Within Box, Vossoughi has set up what he calls a “top-down trickle-down system” where content is kept in folders with the correct security assignments: “The way we’re setting up our folders makes sure that you don’t by mistake share things in folders that you shouldn’t. We took the time to figure that out with folder permissions. Now, I don’t have to worry about usage and security, because we’re doing it at the folder level.” And Box eliminates version-control issues, too. It’s now much easier to share content not just among employees, but with dispersed international vendors and partners. “We’re a pre-IPO company and we have to have these policies in place,” he adds. “When you adopt best-in-class tools. it forces you to think about these things early”

As ChargePoint’s growth trajectory mirrors the trajectory of the EV industry, Vossoughi’s role is an exhilarating one. The technology choices he makes are thoughtful by design — tools that don’t just provide solutions to the immediate needs of the workforce, but integrate well together so that the future is better enabled. With Box as a secure content layer underneath all the company’s IP and regulated content, ChargePoint has a foundation that enables not just content management but also governance, workflows and future AI initiatives.

The blueprint for building a tech stack that enables fast growth:

• Seek out best-in-breed technology solutions that together form the foundation for the entire enterprise, from ERPs and CRMs to a centralized content platform
• Implement org-level technology solutions on top of the foundation to differentiate against competitors
• Empower teams to design their own digital processes, leveraging select collaboration and communication tools, integrated and enabled by a centralized content platform like Box