Our client ran one of the top gas station brands in Korea. However, with the rapid rise of electric vehicles (EVs), they were faced with a mandate to reinvent their business.
As a Director of New Venture Strategy at Daylight Design, I delivered customer-centric requirements and a Product-Market Fit narrative to define an EV charging service that goes above and beyond the current state of the art to meet the bar required by the upcoming target segment — the early majority consumers.
Please note: Some images on this page have been re-created and re-styled with placeholder content to illustrate the work process and the output without disclosing the actual deliverables.
Market Research
Customer Research
Secondary Research
Research Synthesis
Product Strategy
Design Principles
Key Features List
PMF Narrative
Validation Proposal
Plug-n-Charge Proposal
Value Chain Proposal
The EV age is here — and hundreds of gas stations are disappearing every year.
While that’s a death sentence to gas station brands, it also presents a huge opportunity for them to join the new, rapidly growing EV charging market.
Where should a national gas station brand look first, to figure out where to go next?
After customer interviews, observations, and secondary research, we agreed on a set of foundational premises about how EV charging expectations and business approaches are different from the gas station business.
Other EV charging apps focused on solving minor problems and providing workarounds without satisfying the most fundemental customer needs.
However, the real opportunity lies in placing the big bet and solving the underlying problem.
According to our customer & competitive research, we deduced a set of criteria a new generation of EV charging brand and its services will have to meet.
To articulate the EV charging service concept into a testable format and identify major risks, I delivered a draft of Product-Market Fit Narrative.
Each component fits together to form a plausible and understandable story as a whole. At the same time, it is in a falsifiable format (can be evaluated True or False).
This PMF Narrative serves as the basis for an ongoing, deliberate hypothesis validation and accounting process.
The customer experience features implied in the PMF Narrative were then further articulated and illustrated with reference images.
All of above (and more!) was compiled into a 160-page service concept presentation, complete with a suggested roadmap and next steps.
