oracle energy & water
Defining Oracle's First Business Customer Engagement Platform
As the sole product designer, I led product strategy and experience design from vision through executive alignment, helping define Oracle's first end-to-end Business Customer Engagement platform.
Role
Principal Product Designer
scope
Product Strategy • UX Vision • Executive Alignment
team
Product • Engineering • Data Science • Behavioral Science • Research
impact
4.6M customers • 2× CTR
•↑11% CSAT • ↓38% Call-to-Serve
Overview
When Oracle lost its third-party engagement platform, we had a rare opportunity - define from scratch how utilities help business customers understand and manage energy costs. No legacy system to replicate. No existing playbook.
As the sole product designer, I partnered with product management, engineering, behavioral science, data science, and research to define a new product strategy from the ground up. Rather than recreating an existing reporting portal, we focused on helping businesses understand why their bills changed and what actions they should take next.
Business Challenge
Existing utility portals answered the wrong question. Businesses didn't need another dashboard showing historical usage, they needed help understanding unexpected costs, identifying opportunities to save money, and making informed operational decisions across one or many locations.
The challenge wasn't simply designing a new interface. It was defining a product strategy that aligned customer needs, business goals, and Oracle's long-term vision.
Aligning Six Disciplines
One of the first challenges wasn't design - it was alignment.
Product, engineering, sales, behavioral science, and leadership each had different expectations for what the platform should become. Before we could design the experience, we needed a shared understanding of the customer and a common product vision.
I facilitated cross-functional working sessions and introduced recurring leadership reviews to validate direction early, reduce late-stage surprises, and build executive confidence throughout the project.
4 Insights that changed our strategy
Rather than documenting every research activity, we focused on the discoveries that fundamentally changed product direction.
Small and medium businesses are not the same. Their operational needs, decision-making, and engagement patterns differed enough that they required distinct experience strategies.
Businesses wanted explanations, not reports. Customers cared less about historical energy usage than understanding why costs changed and what they should do next.
Personalization required trust. Utilities often lacked meaningful customer context. Asking businesses for information before delivering value would create unnecessary friction.
Email wasn't the destination. The experience needed to begin with proactive outreach and continue through a richer web experience—not treat email as a marketing channel.
Turning Research into Strategy
Rather than presenting personas and journey maps separately, I created Gary's Journey—a future-state narrative illustrating how Oracle could proactively help medium-sized businesses manage energy costs.
Gary became more than a persona.
He became a communication tool that aligned executives, product managers, engineering, and design around a shared vision of the customer experience.
The narrative also gave the team a concrete way to evaluate future roadmap decisions against customer outcomes instead of individual features.
Gary became the shared language the organization used to discuss the future customer experience.
Evolving the Product Strategy
With a shared customer vision established, we shifted our focus from features to outcomes.
Instead of asking "Should we build this feature?", roadmap discussions became "How does this help Gary accomplish his goals?"
Customer goals became the framework for prioritization, revealing gaps in the roadmap while helping product and engineering evaluate trade-offs more objectively.
Solving Personalization
One of the most difficult product questions was personalization.
Utilities typically knew very little about their business customers beyond billing and usage data. Delivering relevant recommendations required earning trust before requesting additional information.
We developed a Business Profile strategy that combined behavioral science, progressive disclosure, and proactive communications to gradually increase personalization over time.
Rather than asking businesses to complete lengthy forms upfront, we first demonstrated value through timely insights delivered by email. As trust increased, customers became more willing to share information, allowing Oracle to provide increasingly relevant recommendations.
Designing the Experience
Once the strategy was aligned, the design process accelerated.
Because the experience vision was already well understood across the team, we moved quickly into higher-fidelity concepts rather than investing heavily in low-fidelity wireframes.
The resulting experience connected proactive email communications with a web platform that helped businesses investigate unusual usage, understand the drivers behind cost changes, and discover recommended actions.
Outcomes
The project established the strategic foundation for Oracle's Business Customer Engagement platform.
Beyond the product itself, the work aligned stakeholders across multiple disciplines around a shared customer vision and product strategy.
Results
- Platform designed for 4.6 million business customers
- 2× increase in email click-through - email became the primary discovery channel, not just a notification
- 11% improvement in customer satisfaction
- 38% reduction in call-to-serve - customers who understood their bills didn't need to call
Reflections...
The biggest lesson from this project wasn't about designing dashboards or emails.
It was about creating alignment.
The most valuable contribution I made wasn't producing UX artifacts - it was helping an organization develop a shared understanding of the customer and using that understanding to drive product strategy.
That experience continues to shape how I approach ambiguous, zero-to-one product work today.
Til next time,
Let's build something meaningful.
If you're tackling a complex product or building something from the ground up, I'd love to hear about it.