Verde were pre-Series A with a product that worked but didn't communicate confidence. I joined for five weeks to redesign the core dashboard turning a cluttered data dump into something their users actually wanted to open. The timing mattered: they were six weeks out from investor demos.
Role
Product Designer
Duration
5 Weeks
Scope
Product Design
Client
Climate Tech
Challenge
Verde's product had a data problem not a shortage of it, but an excess. The dashboard pulled in emissions data, energy usage, supply chain metrics, and compliance scores across multiple sites and time periods. All of it was technically present and correctly calculated. None of it was legible at a glance. The users sustainability leads and operations managers were people under genuine pressure. They had reporting deadlines, board questions to answer, and targets to hit. They needed to open the dashboard, understand their position in thirty seconds, and know what to do next. Instead, they were met with dense tables, overlapping chart types, inconsistent labelling, and a layout that treated every data point as equally important. The result was decision paralysis dressed up as information.
Approach
I spent the first week doing nothing but listening and mapping. I sat in on two user sessions with sustainability leads, reviewed support tickets for patterns, and ran a full audit of every screen in the existing product. The most valuable insight came from a simple question I asked both users: "When you open this dashboard, what are you actually trying to find out?" The answers were consistent and narrow far narrower than the product was built to serve. They wanted to know if they were on track, where the biggest risks were, and what had changed since last week. I chose a dark interface not for aesthetics but for function: data visualisations read more clearly against dark backgrounds, and users were often working in low-light environments for extended sessions.
Outcome
The redesigned dashboard turned a product that users tolerated into one they trusted. Sustainability leads described feeling "in control" for the first time not because they had more data, but because the data they needed was finally where they expected it to be. The dark interface with its clear colour language gave the product a visual confidence that carried into the investor demo. Verde's CEO noted that more than one investor commented on the quality of the product during the pitch unprompted, which rarely happens at that stage.
