Tulli - Venture Creation, Early Stage

This was a venture built from scratch inside Shell's digital innovation team. The first question was not what to build, but whether there was a real problem worth solving, and for whom.

Tulli was an early-stage wind energy venture, and my job was to find out whether the opportunity was real before anyone committed serious resource to building it.

I led the product work from the earliest stage: customer discovery, pain point mapping, and understanding where the real gap in the market was. That meant getting in front of potential customers, running structured interviews, and being willing to challenge assumptions, including the founding hypothesis, when the evidence pointed elsewhere.

From the discovery work, I developed the initial product concept and validation roadmap: what we'd build first, what we'd test, and what success would look like at each stage before moving forward. I also built the business case that secured $1.5M in internal funding to take the venture further.

A funded venture with a validated product direction, based on evidence from customers. Received a Special Recognition Award from Shell for the work.

It also taught me how to work on a product at the very start, before there is a roadmap, a team or a brief.