Shell · E-Mobility Division · 2022—2025
I joined Shell’s e-mobility division as a service designer and left as the person teams came to when a process spanned seven countries and nobody could see the whole of it. Two of those projects are documented in full below.
I joined Shell’s e-mobility division as a service designer and left as the person teams came to when a process spanned seven countries and nobody could see the whole of it. Two of those projects are documented in full below.
Role
Service Designer & User Researcher
Duration
Jul 2022 — Sept 2025
Scope
7 European countries
Team
Cross-functional, 4 disciplines
3 yrs
At Shell
7
Countries
50+
Users interviewed
4
Major programmes
Most of this work was invisible infrastructure — the processes, handovers and tools that let a fast-growing division actually function.
Most of this work was invisible infrastructure — the processes, handovers and tools that let a fast-growing division actually function.
The Remit
Shell’s e-mobility division was scaling quickly across Europe — new markets, new acquisitions, new hires arriving every month. What it did not have was a shared picture of how any of it worked. Resources lived in scattered SharePoint folders with inconsistent access. Processes differed by country. Knowledge sat in individuals rather than systems.
I was the service designer brought in to make those systems visible and then redesign them. Over three years that meant onboarding, pricing infrastructure, an acquisition integration, and eventually building the division’s design research capability itself.
Flagship Projects
01 · Pricing Infrastructure
Shell had no internal tool for setting EV charging prices. A price change took three months in Germany and five weeks in the UK — £3,000 to print stickers and £2,000 to apply them, every time. I led research across seven countries and eleven design iterations to replace it with a portal that changes prices in a click.
24
Interviews
8
Personas
11
Iterations
~25%
Efficiency gain
Read the case study →
02 · Employee Experience
My first project at Shell — and I was inside the persona. Eleven interviews with new joiners, three distinct onboarding personas, and a 37-step journey map later, I pitched eleven concepts to stakeholders who had given the project no budget and no billing code. Six shipped.
11
Interviews
3
Personas
6
Concepts shipped
~20%
Satisfaction lift
Read the case study →
Impact figures are directional estimates validated with stakeholders at the time, not independently audited measurements.
The Full Arc
Keep scrolling — the next section moves horizontally.
Shell · 2022 — 2025
July 2022
Joined the e-mobility division as a service designer. Spent the first weeks unable to find out who did what, where anything lived, or which of the division’s product lines I was actually attached to. That confusion became my first project.
Arrival
Aug — Dec 2022
Eleven interviews with recent joiners surfaced three distinct personas — the brand-new hire, the internal mover, and the contractor with partial access. The hardest part was getting people to admit out loud that they did not understand the division they worked in.
Onboarding redesign
December 2022
The onboarding work started with no billing code — it was treated as an afterthought. I took eleven prioritised concepts to senior stakeholders and left with funding for six, including welcome boxes for new hires.
The pitch
2023
Discovery for the EV price setting platform: 24 interviews across seven regions, 52 needs and 55 pain points mapped, five journey maps consolidated into a single ten-step service blueprint spanning eight personas and seven touchpoints.
EV pricing · Discovery
2023
The fuels pricing team wanted EV pricing bolted onto their existing tool. It would have been faster to learn and wrong in every other way — EV pricing runs on a different set of variables entirely. With no service designer on the fuels side, I became the translator between the two teams so our PM could write user stories in language fuels managers actually recognised.
The conflict
Q2 2023
Internal recognition for owning the research and service design approach on Shell’s first internal EV price configuration tool.
Recognition
November 2023
Rollout began with the Benelux region, then the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Lead times that had run to a month collapsed to near-instant.
Go live
Feb — Nov 2024
Mapped the end-to-end B2B and B2C service ecosystems of a sister e-mobility entity across multiple European markets, producing the blueprints that carried the transition into the parent company. Much of this work remains confidential.
Shell Recharge
2024 — 2025
Ran a division-wide service design programme — an open session for 50–70 people across disciplines, then a hands-on cohort of seven or eight. Alongside it, I led a design maturity assessment, interviewing every lead and manager with designers under them to find out whether they were equipped to support them after the reorg.
Capability building
September 2025
Left Shell for an MRes in Creative Computing at UAL, researching how reward design shapes the safety of reinforcement learning agents. The through-line is unchanged: what happens to people when a system optimises for the wrong thing.
What’s next
Wider Work
01
Nine months mapping the B2B and B2C service ecosystems of an acquired e-mobility entity across European markets. Journey maps and service blueprints supported a transition that reduced operational costs by around 20%. The detail stays confidential.
Feb — Nov 2024 · Confidential
02
Led research into how design was actually practised across business verticals after a reorganisation — structured questionnaires, 30-minute scoping interviews and hour-long deep dives with every lead and manager responsible for designers. The output shaped the roadmap for scaling service design practice.
2024 — 2025 · Self-initiated
03
Served on the design team’s hiring panel, running structured portfolio and behavioural interviews and making joint hire/no-hire decisions on evidence rather than impression. Mentored junior designers and researchers across cross-country project teams.
2023 — 2025 · Design panel
Teaching
The wider session drew 50–70 people from across the vertical, each discipline presenting its own craft. Then a cohort of seven or eight who actually wanted to learn service design — two sessions and a practical exercise. Teaching it forced me to articulate what I had been doing by instinct.
Reflection
The thing I keep returning to about Shell is how much of the work was translation. Between fuels and EV. Between a parent company and an acquisition. Between people who knew a process intimately and people who had never seen it written down. The design artefacts mattered, but what actually moved things was being the person in the room who could hold both languages at once.
It also taught me that a well-specified objective is not the same as a good one. A pricing process optimised for control produced three-month lead times and £5,000 sticker bills. That gap between what a system was designed to do and what it actually did to the people inside it is, more or less exactly, what I went back to university to study.
Next
Shell · E-Mobility Division · 2022—2025
I joined Shell’s e-mobility division as a service designer and left as the person teams came to when a process spanned seven countries and nobody could see the whole of it. Two of those projects are documented in full below.
I joined Shell’s e-mobility division as a service designer and left as the person teams came to when a process spanned seven countries and nobody could see the whole of it. Two of those projects are documented in full below.
Role
Service Designer & User Researcher
Duration
Jul 2022 — Sept 2025
Scope
7 European countries
Team
Cross-functional, 4 disciplines
3 yrs
At Shell
7
Countries
50+
Users interviewed
4
Major programmes
Most of this work was invisible infrastructure — the processes, handovers and tools that let a fast-growing division actually function.
Most of this work was invisible infrastructure — the processes, handovers and tools that let a fast-growing division actually function.
The Remit
Shell’s e-mobility division was scaling quickly across Europe — new markets, new acquisitions, new hires arriving every month. What it did not have was a shared picture of how any of it worked. Resources lived in scattered SharePoint folders with inconsistent access. Processes differed by country. Knowledge sat in individuals rather than systems.
I was the service designer brought in to make those systems visible and then redesign them. Over three years that meant onboarding, pricing infrastructure, an acquisition integration, and eventually building the division’s design research capability itself.
Flagship Projects
01 · Pricing Infrastructure
Shell had no internal tool for setting EV charging prices. A price change took three months in Germany and five weeks in the UK — £3,000 to print stickers and £2,000 to apply them, every time. I led research across seven countries and eleven design iterations to replace it with a portal that changes prices in a click.
24
Interviews
8
Personas
11
Iterations
~25%
Efficiency gain
Read the case study →
02 · Employee Experience
My first project at Shell — and I was inside the persona. Eleven interviews with new joiners, three distinct onboarding personas, and a 37-step journey map later, I pitched eleven concepts to stakeholders who had given the project no budget and no billing code. Six shipped.
11
Interviews
3
Personas
6
Concepts shipped
~20%
Satisfaction lift
Read the case study →
Impact figures are directional estimates validated with stakeholders at the time, not independently audited measurements.
The Full Arc
Keep scrolling — the next section moves horizontally.
Shell · 2022 — 2025
July 2022
Joined the e-mobility division as a service designer. Spent the first weeks unable to find out who did what, where anything lived, or which of the division’s product lines I was actually attached to. That confusion became my first project.
Arrival
Aug — Dec 2022
Eleven interviews with recent joiners surfaced three distinct personas — the brand-new hire, the internal mover, and the contractor with partial access. The hardest part was getting people to admit out loud that they did not understand the division they worked in.
Onboarding redesign
December 2022
The onboarding work started with no billing code — it was treated as an afterthought. I took eleven prioritised concepts to senior stakeholders and left with funding for six, including welcome boxes for new hires.
The pitch
2023
Discovery for the EV price setting platform: 24 interviews across seven regions, 52 needs and 55 pain points mapped, five journey maps consolidated into a single ten-step service blueprint spanning eight personas and seven touchpoints.
EV pricing · Discovery
2023
The fuels pricing team wanted EV pricing bolted onto their existing tool. It would have been faster to learn and wrong in every other way — EV pricing runs on a different set of variables entirely. With no service designer on the fuels side, I became the translator between the two teams so our PM could write user stories in language fuels managers actually recognised.
The conflict
Q2 2023
Internal recognition for owning the research and service design approach on Shell’s first internal EV price configuration tool.
Recognition
November 2023
Rollout began with the Benelux region, then the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Lead times that had run to a month collapsed to near-instant.
Go live
Feb — Nov 2024
Mapped the end-to-end B2B and B2C service ecosystems of a sister e-mobility entity across multiple European markets, producing the blueprints that carried the transition into the parent company. Much of this work remains confidential.
Shell Recharge
2024 — 2025
Ran a division-wide service design programme — an open session for 50–70 people across disciplines, then a hands-on cohort of seven or eight. Alongside it, I led a design maturity assessment, interviewing every lead and manager with designers under them to find out whether they were equipped to support them after the reorg.
Capability building
September 2025
Left Shell for an MRes in Creative Computing at UAL, researching how reward design shapes the safety of reinforcement learning agents. The through-line is unchanged: what happens to people when a system optimises for the wrong thing.
What’s next
Wider Work
01
Nine months mapping the B2B and B2C service ecosystems of an acquired e-mobility entity across European markets. Journey maps and service blueprints supported a transition that reduced operational costs by around 20%. The detail stays confidential.
Feb — Nov 2024 · Confidential
02
Led research into how design was actually practised across business verticals after a reorganisation — structured questionnaires, 30-minute scoping interviews and hour-long deep dives with every lead and manager responsible for designers. The output shaped the roadmap for scaling service design practice.
2024 — 2025 · Self-initiated
03
Served on the design team’s hiring panel, running structured portfolio and behavioural interviews and making joint hire/no-hire decisions on evidence rather than impression. Mentored junior designers and researchers across cross-country project teams.
2023 — 2025 · Design panel
Teaching
The wider session drew 50–70 people from across the vertical, each discipline presenting its own craft. Then a cohort of seven or eight who actually wanted to learn service design — two sessions and a practical exercise. Teaching it forced me to articulate what I had been doing by instinct.
Reflection
The thing I keep returning to about Shell is how much of the work was translation. Between fuels and EV. Between a parent company and an acquisition. Between people who knew a process intimately and people who had never seen it written down. The design artefacts mattered, but what actually moved things was being the person in the room who could hold both languages at once.
It also taught me that a well-specified objective is not the same as a good one. A pricing process optimised for control produced three-month lead times and £5,000 sticker bills. That gap between what a system was designed to do and what it actually did to the people inside it is, more or less exactly, what I went back to university to study.
Next
Shell · E-Mobility Division · 2022—2025
I joined Shell’s e-mobility division as a service designer and left as the person teams came to when a process spanned seven countries and nobody could see the whole of it. Two of those projects are documented in full below.
I joined Shell’s e-mobility division as a service designer and left as the person teams came to when a process spanned seven countries and nobody could see the whole of it. Two of those projects are documented in full below.
Role
Service Designer & User Researcher
Duration
Jul 2022 — Sept 2025
Scope
7 European countries
Team
Cross-functional, 4 disciplines
3 yrs
At Shell
7
Countries
50+
Users interviewed
4
Major programmes
Most of this work was invisible infrastructure — the processes, handovers and tools that let a fast-growing division actually function.
Most of this work was invisible infrastructure — the processes, handovers and tools that let a fast-growing division actually function.
The Remit
Shell’s e-mobility division was scaling quickly across Europe — new markets, new acquisitions, new hires arriving every month. What it did not have was a shared picture of how any of it worked. Resources lived in scattered SharePoint folders with inconsistent access. Processes differed by country. Knowledge sat in individuals rather than systems.
I was the service designer brought in to make those systems visible and then redesign them. Over three years that meant onboarding, pricing infrastructure, an acquisition integration, and eventually building the division’s design research capability itself.
Flagship Projects
01 · Pricing Infrastructure
Shell had no internal tool for setting EV charging prices. A price change took three months in Germany and five weeks in the UK — £3,000 to print stickers and £2,000 to apply them, every time. I led research across seven countries and eleven design iterations to replace it with a portal that changes prices in a click.
24
Interviews
8
Personas
11
Iterations
~25%
Efficiency gain
Read the case study →
02 · Employee Experience
My first project at Shell — and I was inside the persona. Eleven interviews with new joiners, three distinct onboarding personas, and a 37-step journey map later, I pitched eleven concepts to stakeholders who had given the project no budget and no billing code. Six shipped.
11
Interviews
3
Personas
6
Concepts shipped
~20%
Satisfaction lift
Read the case study →
Impact figures are directional estimates validated with stakeholders at the time, not independently audited measurements.
The Full Arc
Keep scrolling — the next section moves horizontally.
Shell · 2022 — 2025
July 2022
Joined the e-mobility division as a service designer. Spent the first weeks unable to find out who did what, where anything lived, or which of the division’s product lines I was actually attached to. That confusion became my first project.
Arrival
Aug — Dec 2022
Eleven interviews with recent joiners surfaced three distinct personas — the brand-new hire, the internal mover, and the contractor with partial access. The hardest part was getting people to admit out loud that they did not understand the division they worked in.
Onboarding redesign
December 2022
The onboarding work started with no billing code — it was treated as an afterthought. I took eleven prioritised concepts to senior stakeholders and left with funding for six, including welcome boxes for new hires.
The pitch
2023
Discovery for the EV price setting platform: 24 interviews across seven regions, 52 needs and 55 pain points mapped, five journey maps consolidated into a single ten-step service blueprint spanning eight personas and seven touchpoints.
EV pricing · Discovery
2023
The fuels pricing team wanted EV pricing bolted onto their existing tool. It would have been faster to learn and wrong in every other way — EV pricing runs on a different set of variables entirely. With no service designer on the fuels side, I became the translator between the two teams so our PM could write user stories in language fuels managers actually recognised.
The conflict
Q2 2023
Internal recognition for owning the research and service design approach on Shell’s first internal EV price configuration tool.
Recognition
November 2023
Rollout began with the Benelux region, then the UK, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Lead times that had run to a month collapsed to near-instant.
Go live
Feb — Nov 2024
Mapped the end-to-end B2B and B2C service ecosystems of a sister e-mobility entity across multiple European markets, producing the blueprints that carried the transition into the parent company. Much of this work remains confidential.
Shell Recharge
2024 — 2025
Ran a division-wide service design programme — an open session for 50–70 people across disciplines, then a hands-on cohort of seven or eight. Alongside it, I led a design maturity assessment, interviewing every lead and manager with designers under them to find out whether they were equipped to support them after the reorg.
Capability building
September 2025
Left Shell for an MRes in Creative Computing at UAL, researching how reward design shapes the safety of reinforcement learning agents. The through-line is unchanged: what happens to people when a system optimises for the wrong thing.
What’s next
Wider Work
01
Nine months mapping the B2B and B2C service ecosystems of an acquired e-mobility entity across European markets. Journey maps and service blueprints supported a transition that reduced operational costs by around 20%. The detail stays confidential.
Feb — Nov 2024 · Confidential
02
Led research into how design was actually practised across business verticals after a reorganisation — structured questionnaires, 30-minute scoping interviews and hour-long deep dives with every lead and manager responsible for designers. The output shaped the roadmap for scaling service design practice.
2024 — 2025 · Self-initiated
03
Served on the design team’s hiring panel, running structured portfolio and behavioural interviews and making joint hire/no-hire decisions on evidence rather than impression. Mentored junior designers and researchers across cross-country project teams.
2023 — 2025 · Design panel
Teaching
The wider session drew 50–70 people from across the vertical, each discipline presenting its own craft. Then a cohort of seven or eight who actually wanted to learn service design — two sessions and a practical exercise. Teaching it forced me to articulate what I had been doing by instinct.
Reflection
The thing I keep returning to about Shell is how much of the work was translation. Between fuels and EV. Between a parent company and an acquisition. Between people who knew a process intimately and people who had never seen it written down. The design artefacts mattered, but what actually moved things was being the person in the room who could hold both languages at once.
It also taught me that a well-specified objective is not the same as a good one. A pricing process optimised for control produced three-month lead times and £5,000 sticker bills. That gap between what a system was designed to do and what it actually did to the people inside it is, more or less exactly, what I went back to university to study.
Next