Shell Recharge Solutions · Pricing Infrastructure · 2023
Shell was changing EV prices with a sticker.
24
Users interviewed
7
Regions
8
Personas
11
Design iterations
~100
Hours of usability testing
I led the research and service design. Delivery was cross-functional in nature, ranging through product, engineering, business analysis and pricing teams across seven markets.
The problem
A price change cost £5,000 and took three months
When EV charging launched, price changes were rare enough that physical stickers on the charge point were a reasonable way to display them. Then the market accelerated. Prices needed to move monthly, sometimes faster, and stickers could not keep up.
In Germany a price change took roughly three months. In the UK it took five weeks and cost about £3,000 to print the stickers and another £2,000 to send people out to apply them, every time. Shell was losing ground not because it priced badly, but because it could not physically change a number fast enough.
~3 months
To change a price in Germany
~5 weeks
To change a price in the UK
~£5,000
Print and apply cost, per change
The constraints
There was nothing to copy
01
No precedent
No EV price-setting tool existed inside Shell. The fuels equivalent ran on a different set of variables entirely, so it could inform the work but could not be copied.
02
Seven markets, seven processes
Job titles, responsibilities and approval chains differed by country. The tool had to feel native to a pricing manager in the Netherlands and one in Austria simultaneously.
03
Expertise pointing the wrong way
Almost every user was fluent in fuel pricing. That fluency was an obstacle. They had to unlearn a vocabulary before they could learn the one EV pricing needed.
Research approach
Twenty-four people who each knew one seventh of the problem
Nobody had the whole picture. Every pricing manager understood their own market intimately and had almost no visibility of anyone else’s. The research was less about discovering unknown needs and more about assembling a system nobody had ever seen end to end.
In-depth interviews
At least one pricing manager and one analyst per region across seven markets, plus fuels pricing stakeholders.
Comparative analysis
Studied the existing fuels pricing tool to understand what transferred and what would mislead.
Journey mapping
As-is mapping of the end-to-end price change process in each market.
Usability testing
Roughly 100 hours across eleven iterations with stakeholders from multiple regions.
Findings
Nine themes, three that mattered most
52 needs and 55 pain points, synthesised across 24 interviews into nine themes.
01
Lead time was the real product
Users talked about features. What they needed was speed. Every other pain point — competitiveness, margin, credibility with local teams — collapsed into that one number.
02
Flexibility beat completeness
A tool that did everything but assumed one process would fail in six of seven markets. Users needed to shape the process around their own market rather than adopt someone else’s.
03
Visibility was a precondition for trust
Pricing managers would not act on a system they could not see into. Knowing what had changed, by whom, and what was live right now mattered as much as the ability to change it.
Personas
Eight roles across two organisations
Personas spanned Shell and Shell Recharge Solutions, and the same job title did not mean the same job in every market. Mapping who actually held each responsibility, market by market, was a substantial part of the work.
Pricing Manager
Senior Pricing Analyst
Pricing Analyst
Territory Manager
Super User
Roaming Manager
Technical Manager
Onboarding Manager
Synthesis
Five journey maps, folded into one blueprint
Each market had its own as-is journey. Consolidating five of them produced a single end-to-end service blueprint: a ten-step process from commissioning a charge point through to strategic price changes, spanning eight personas and seven touchpoints and tools.
Consolidated service blueprint — 10 steps, 8 personas, 7 touchpoints
As-is journey map of the end-to-end price change process
10
Process steps
8
Personas
7
Touchpoints & tools
Stakeholder alignment
The fuels team wanted to bolt EV onto their tool. They were not wrong about the learning curve.
The fuels position
Add EV pricing as a side menu inside the existing fuels tool. One system, one login, a familiar interface, and a far shorter learning curve for managers already using it daily.
What the research showed
EV pricing runs on different variables and different terminology altogether. Bolting it onto a fuels structure would force EV concepts into fuels shapes — faster to learn, and wrong everywhere the two domains diverge.
There was no service designer on the fuels side. I became the translator — gathering requirements and constraints from fuels pricing managers and analysts, then relaying them to our product manager so user stories could be written in language the fuels side recognised. Most of the resolution happened in conversations, not artefacts.
Design process
The market kept moving, so the design kept moving
Iteration one was barely a design — it was a proposal that prices could be changed online at all rather than physically. For Shell at that point this was a genuine departure. Every subsequent iteration added functionality and, more often, tested competing versions of the same functionality to work out which direction the tool should take. We iterated eleven times because the EV market was changing faster than the design cycle. Shipping a tool built around pain points from six months earlier would have missed.
01 — Can this happen online at all?
11 — Shipped
The constant across all eleven: set up and change a price in the fewest possible steps without losing critical functionality.
What shipped
A portal instead of a print run
Price setting flow
Approval and audit trail
Live price overview
Screens are blurred and redacted. Commercially sensitive pricing detail has been removed.
Rollout
Live from November 2023
Rollout began in the Netherlands, then extended to the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Because the process differed by market, each launch involved reconciling the shared tool with local approval chains and job structures.
Netherlands
United Kingdom
Germany
Switzerland
Austria
Shell Recharge network across Europe
1 month → near-immediate
Price change lead time
~25%
Process efficiency gain for pricing managers
Stakeholder feedback
“We have been using it since November 1st and it seems to be working very well operationally. Pricing updates are also easy to perform. As far as I am concerned, these are also the most important aspects in anticipation of a slightly more advanced pricing system, where we can truly implement automated pricing.”
Pricing Manager · Benelux
“First stage of dynamic pricing implemented in November enables local pricing teams to adjust Shell Recharge MSP prices in a basic way, with immediate effect. Which is simply great! Lead time in the past was one month - now we can do it almost ad-hoc! The group of sites can follow same pricing pattern. This is really helpful!”
Pricing Strategy Advisor · Benelux
Recognition
Shell IDT E-Mobility Superstar
Q2 2023
Nominated for owning the research and service design approach on this project — a first-of-its-kind platform for Shell — while managing stakeholders, users and deliverables in a dynamically complex environment.
EXD End of Year Recognition
December 2023
Recognised by the Head of Design for outstanding contributions to the e-mobility division. Acknowledged for actively leading and supporting high-priority senior stakeholder projects.
Reflection
The hardest part was not designing the tool. It was holding seven versions of the same process in mind at once and finding the shape that felt native to all of them without flattening any into someone else’s way of working.
It also taught me that the most valuable thing a researcher brings to a cross-functional standoff is not the finding itself, but the ability to carry it intact into a room where people use different words for the same thing.
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