How we built the Elaway Platform
Going from manually onboarding every Elaway-user to automatically onboarding thousands.
About Elaway
Elaway accelerates electric car adoption by building large-scale charging infrastructure for housing associations in Germany, Sweden, and Norway. After five years, we operate 1.600+ charging facilities covering 140,000+ parking spaces. With over 70 employees across six offices (Bergen, Oslo, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmø, and Munich), we remain committed to leading the industry, backed by recent funding.
I manage the Product & Technology team in Elaway, which has, together with great help from other colleagues in Elaway, built the Elaway Platform.
The starting point 2022: A lot of mess. For good reasons
In 2022, the situation in Elaway resulted from several years of searching for product market fit and mergers with other companies.
Elaway at this point in 2022:
We were selling to and operating three segments: housing associations, commercial real estate, and other B2B segments.
We were running 3-5 systems to manage chargers in the field.
Customer and user onboarding was done manually, with employees spending their days transferring data from user forms to various systems, resulting in delays.
Data quality was poor, making it hard to automate the processes in the point above.
Our support team had to navigate 5-7 different product offerings, leading to extensive training and confusion over identifying user issues.
Data quality was poor, making it difficult to trust business analytics
The situation above is normal for a startup. You move fast and experiment with different segments and product offerings to find product market fit. However, it is not sustainable to continue to address several customer segments and offer several distinct product offerings to those segments—at least not in a market and industry that relies on economies of scale to enable needed margins.
The model below shows the systems and manual processes involved in onboarding a housing association onto our systems and enabling a user living in that housing association to charge their car.
The model above is expensive, and at one point, you have to choose “where and how to play.” Elaway did precisely that in 2022;
The Elaway-pivot in 2022: Focusing on one segment
Recognizing the need to streamline, Elaway made three key decisions in 2022:
Elaway decided to address only one segment. We decided to focus on facility installation and operation for housing associations for several reasons. Still, the most distinctive was that they needed very different product offerings and that we would have to do several different sets of marketing messaging/positioning, several ways of selling several different product offerings, several ways of operating several different product offerings and several ways of supporting several different product offerings. You get the point.
Elaway decided to strive to give that one segment, housing associations, the best possible product offering we could give them.
Elaway decided to automate every manual process that made financial sense. This will enable scale advantages, which means spreading our fixed cost to as many users as possible.
These decisions led to the concept of the Elaway Platform, a platform designed to streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve user experience.
The Elaway platform: Vision and goals from 2022
As far as I remember, in 2022, we set the following platform vision: “We will build The Elaway Platform to make Elaway`s marketing, sales, operations, and support teams the most efficient in our industry.”
Platform goals:
Automation of key processes
24/7 system availability with instant user responses
Making essential operation and support tasks substantially faster
As few systems and features in the platform as possible
Reliable data insights
The result in 2024: - A lot less mess
It's not a binary answer to whether or not we got where we wanted to, but I can say that we reached most, if not all, of our goals, depending on how you define when a system is “done.” That does not mean everything is working perfectly, and we must continuously improve the platform.
The result after over two years of work is:
Our most valuable processes from a financial standpoint are now automated
Our users can onboard onto our platform 24 hours, seven days a week, and start charging within minutes.
Our colleauges in operations and support can now help customers more efficiently by using an in-house built system that enables “one-click” actions that previously were “10-click” actions in several systems.
A leaner system stack means fewer systems and third-party providers, simpler architecture, simpler data models, and fewer integrations.
An updated “continuous deployment” engineering practice, deploying to production up to dozens of times a day, facilitating rapid value delivery to the business and customers in an always-available and safe manner.
Since we have fewer systems, less training is needed in different parts of the company.
Our head of data and insight now has access to better and more reliable data and can thus feed our colleagues with higher-quality insights.
Below, you can see an illustration of the platform we built. As you can understand, I cannot give system-specific details as this is part of what we believe to be key to our current and future success.
Pains along the way
Losing people in the process: Building a platform like what we have built requires a lot. At times, some people in the Product & Technology department have been stuck in repetitive tasks for too long, making them, understandably, look for other work.
Organizing and working with stakeholders: In such a big project, it is always challenging, and we have had to reorganize how we work with stakeholders several times to get to where we are now. This is neither the stakeholder's fault nor the Product & technology`s fault; I believe it's more or less the nature of our game. Growing and building at the same time is hard. (and fun)
Data quality: Moving from manual processes where humans talk to systems to automated processes where systems talk to systems requires much more “binary data” to work. So, when moving our “manually created data” into the new automated platform, we had some very challenging months, and we still have to a certain extent. Our automated processes now work around 90% of the time. The lacking 10% is due to missing or corrupt data. We believe we will be at 100% within a couple of months.
Estimates: You might have heard about the “planning fallacy.” (It describes our tendency to underestimate the time it will take to complete a task and the costs and risks associated with that task—even if our experiences contradict this.) We have seen this a lot over the last two years. To summarize, estimating how long it takes to build something that has not been built before is challenging. This has led to strain in the Elaway organization as we have “promised” to deliver X at X repeatedly and failed to do so. I'm unsure if I will ever get better at this; I have struggled with estimates since starting my product career in 2008.
The team that built it
This is the part that makes me most proud: the team that built it. They have gone through the highs of launching the first automation and the lows of understanding the complexity of dealing with legacy data quality over time.
Head of Engineering: Jonathan.
Head of Product: Adrian.
Head of Data & Insights: Helle.
Head of Hardware and CPMS: Truls.
Exceptional engineers spanning from some seriously excellent “fresh out of school” engineers and some senior heavy hitters: Damian, Martin, Joakim, Alexander, Andreas, Lars-Erik, Sølve, Lars, George, Richard, Pieter.
Last but not least, our very own UX/UI Designer, Eadington.
And thanks to all our brilliant colleagues at Elaway!
Thanks to all the colleauges in Elaway, who have guided our development of the platform with their business insights and been patient with us as we have progressed toward the first version, and that I know will help us improve it going forward.
Next post: The financial impact of The Elaway Platform
In the next post, I will share the platform's financial impact on our business, including the time saved from start to end of a user journey in Elaway. I will also share the cost side: What does it cost to build something like the Elaway Platform?