Client stories
Case Enersense Charging: Improving Product Leadership and Head of Product Recruitment
Case Enersense Charging: Improving Product Leadership and Head of Product Recruitment
Enersense International Plc is a pioneer in the green energy revolution and is known for its commitment to building an emission-free and energy self-sufficient future.
Listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange, Enersense offers a wide range of services critical to industrial, energy and telecommunications companies mainly in the Nordics and Baltics.
Enersense Charging, one of Enersense’s strategic growth areas and businesses, is an agile fast charger manufacturer with an ambitious aim of developing the best electric vehicle (EV) fast chargingers.
Enersense Charging was on-going its first full year as charger manufacturer and building foundation for the business and future growth. Product management responsibilities were scattered within the organisation and the need to have a dedicated product leader in the organization was identified.
“To enable growth, more clarity was needed on many aspects of product strategy and organisation, including clarity of responsibilities, target customer segments, product roadmap, and prioritisation. We had already confronted some of these typical growth challenges and realized that getting someone from outside of our organization, experienced in both growth and product leadership to work with us would ensure we take the right steps and speed up our progress.”, says Ville Miettinen, Vice President, EV Charging at Enersense.
With the next generation fast chargers planned to hit general availability and the company’s ambitious international growth plans, the timing was right for a product leadership analysis to support Enersense Charging’s growth strategy.
We agreed to conduct a product leadership analysis project that provides the organization with an understanding of the current state of product leadership in the company, taking into account the company's vision, strategy, plans, products, and the business environment in which it operates.
Our approach is simple: we help our clients design a strategy, test it, and scale it up, if it works. Coventures’ entrepreneurs have firsthand experience in strategic planning and execution, and know how to navigate complex business contexts and issues. We also place significant emphasis on the practicality of our recommendations. We tailor our advice to fit within our client’s existing resources and capabilities.
Enersense Charging already had a strategy, and they had conducted a detailed market analysis just a few months earlier. To enable and help Enersense Charging grow, we wanted to understand the current situation of product leadership in the company. Therefore, the focus of the product leadership analysis was to test how well the organization understood the strategy, and how it was set up to execute the strategy, especially from the product management and product leadership perspective, and to provide comments on the details of the strategy and any roles, responsibilities or processes related to product leadership.
We provide an external perspective while integrating with our client’s team and acting as one of the players in the team.
“Coventures presented a preliminary plan for conducting the product leadership analysis. Involving our team members in the process with interviews was immediately a good sign, as well as the proposal to keep the business unit management in sync with the progress on a weekly basis.” says Ville Miettinen.
We conducted stakeholder interviews to gain views from different roles at Enersense Charging. In the interviews, we covered such topics as roles, responsibilities, products, markets, customers, strategy, organization, collaboration, use of data, and the maturity of product management processes.
We also went through available materials and documentation related to strategy, products, markets, and product management processes.
Leadership at Enersense Charging was kept up-to-date and in control of the process in our weekly meetings.
Already during the project, it was evident that Enersense Charing needed someone to be in charge of product leadership. We agreed to define the responsibilities of the new role and its relationship with other key roles in the team.
At the end of our project, we held a workshop with the Enersense Charging Team to go through our findings and also to reflect them with the best practices and modern product management know-how. In the workshop, we prioritized the roadmap for improvement actions together with the team to set them on the right, mutually agreed-upon path for progress.
Figure 1. The five key themes of Coventures’ product leadership analysis.
Ville Miettinen, Vice President, EV Charging at Enersense comments: “We had already internally identified some potential areas of improvement in our product strategy and product leadership, including the need to hire an experienced product leader. Collaboration with Coventures helped us confirm that our planned actions were correct and properly timed. In addition, Coventures identified additional important actions, provided reasoning for these actions drawn from the best practices of modern Product Leadership, and helped us prioritize these actions into concrete next steps.”
“After helping us plan the most relevant next steps to support our growth, we chose Coventures to also help us in recruiting an experienced Product Leader. We were pleased with the smooth integration of Coventure’s recruitment activities and our own recruiting process, and the relevant pool of candidates Coventures was able to find in a relatively short time.”, Ville Miettinen continues.
With a more focused strategy and go-to-market plan, a new Head of Product in the team, and a clear roadmap for further improving the product leadership and overall business performance, Enersense Charging is well positioned to reach its ambitious growth targets.
If you are in a product business and hungry for growth, especially internationally, and your business is lacking clear responsibilities and practices for creating and maintaining a product roadmap or prioritizing between different potential customer segments, it is most likely time for you to level up your product leadership function.
If you want to ensure you reach your growth targets, or if you have identified areas for improvement in your product management practices, contact us to discuss with the best in the field of Product Leadership in Finland.