installHUB
Sole product manager on a green tech platform for companies installing EV chargers, solar and batteries.
I was installHUB's only product manager, from February 2023 to January 2024. installHUB is a phone app and a desktop platform for installation businesses, covering jobs, leads, quotes, DNO registrations, MCS compliance and payments.
The invoicing rework
This one was mine from start to finish, and it sat on the money. Invoicing was one of the core functions of the platform and payment ran through it, so the cost of getting it wrong was immediate.
One installer billing one customer is simple. A nested network is not. Once work is subcontracted down a chain it stops being obvious who owns the job, who raises the invoice, who collects the money, and whose company details are allowed to appear on the paperwork, and some of them have to be withheld deliberately. An installer working for themselves, an installer working for another installer, and an installer working under a wider company's brand each need a different document. Somebody vets it, somebody adds their markup, and only then does it reach the customer.
I rebuilt it around all of that, with payments taken through the portal on Stripe's vendor model. Unpicking the back end I inherited went deep enough that our payment provider had to change the way it handled vendors before any of it would work. I got that change made, and the rework shipped and went into use.
The field operations project
Most of my last months went on one project, turning the platform into a field operations system for revenue protection and debt recovery at a UK Big Six energy retailer. I spent months on the road getting the requirements, working with more than a hundred field officers in workshops across regional offices, wearing the client's kit and going into members of the public's homes to watch the job being done.
I built the cost model with the founder, covering the build, the ongoing per-user charge and maintenance, and set it against the developer capacity we actually had. It showed the project losing money at the budget the client had put on the table, so I took that back to them rather than let us sign up to it. When they brought in consultants and moved the goalposts, I re-pitched the plan, gave ground where it was fair and pushed the rest into later phases.
The requirements and the delivery plan were mine. The deal fell through at the client's end, so the build never started.
I led product against commercial, sales and client goals, and ran the delivery board with engineering.
I inherited a team with far more testers than developers. Releases made the company nervous, and hiring more testers was how that nervousness had been dealt with. I thought the real bottleneck was the quality of what developers handed over, not how much of it got tested afterwards, so I moved the checking earlier. Developers started checking their own work before passing it on, and we took QA steps out.
I left in January 2024. The administration came later.