Introduction

Carbon Direct helps businesses and governments measure and manage their carbon footprint, combining advisory services with a SaaS platform. Its customers range from Fortune 500 companies to high-growth startups and heavy industry. The platform covers three areas: measuring emissions (the GHG inventory), reducing them (decarbonization strategies), and removing what remains (the voluntary carbon market).

Measurement and removal were well established. Reduction was not. The company had just formed a small Decarbonization team to figure out what a reduction product could look like, and I joined it a few weeks after starting as Senior Product Designer. Our starting point was a question customers kept asking:

Laura (Sr. Product Manager), Jasper (Sr. Engineer) and I formed the core team. We also pulled in colleagues from across the company for workshops and interviews: a climate scientist, a customer support manager, a carbon accountant, and a data analyst.

I structured the project to run for five days, with these milestones:

• Collect existing insights about customers and the market
• Identify past decarbonization efforts and pain points
• Narrow the scope and pick one user problem to solve
• Run collaborative sessions to test assumptions and generate sketches
• Turn the results into a user flow and wireframes
• Present to leadership

Challenges

A few days of digging made the constraints clear:

Behind all of this sat a bigger question for the company: could its deep scientific expertise and bespoke advisory work be turned into a scalable product? This sprint was a first test of that.

Approach and Methodology

A full Design Sprint would not have worked here. We had no product to test and no users lined up, and we needed alignment more than validation. So I kept the Understand, Sketch, and Decide phases and dropped the rest. That gave us room to:

• Gather what the company already knew about customers and past decarbonization efforts
• Get the team up the learning curve fast by putting carbon scientists in the room
• Make decisions and keep moving despite the uncertainty
• Focus on turning domain expertise into concrete platform features

I ran the group sessions as Miro workshops over Zoom, and held one-on-one interviews with stakeholders between sessions to gather insights and check our assumptions.

Process & Execution

Each day of the sprint centered on a few key activities:

1. Insight Collection and Problem Definition

   • I gathered existing research to sharpen the problem definition
   • Together, we mapped market opportunities against company OKRs
   • I drafted customer journey maps focused on the decarbonization phase
   • We wrote persona cards for primary and secondary users
   • I mapped how the advisory team worked at the time to spot gaps and opportunities

2. Problem Mapping and Goal Setting

   • I ran a session to set the long-term goal for the project
   • We mapped the actors and actions leading to that goal
   • I prepared targeted questions for the expert sessions ahead

3. Expert Consultation and Problem Targeting

   • I walked stakeholders through the problem map in one-on-one interviews
   • We documented their feedback
   • We turned that feedback into "How Might We" (HMW) statements
   • We grouped the statements into categories
   • We picked one target statement to carry into the sketching session

4. Solution Ideation

   • I opened with a review of everything we had learned during the week
   • I facilitated a team sketching session to generate solution ideas
   • We tied the strongest ideas back to the personas, the journey map, and our differentiators

5. Concept Refinement and Presentation

   • I turned our sketches into a single flowchart
   • I built wireframes around the key insights and ideas
   • We presented both to the internal team
   • We delivered the final presentation to leadership

Deliverables and Artifacts

Here is what the week produced, and how each piece moved our thinking forward.

I led the work on positioning: where a decarbonization product could sit in the market, what made Carbon Direct’s version different, and how it connected to the company’s objectives and key results (OKRs). This gave us a clear link between the product ideas and the business goals behind them.

I facilitated the mapping of the customer experience across the whole carbon management process, with emphasis on the decarbonization phase. We revised the maps several times as interviews taught us how differently customers approach reduction depending on their “carbon maturity”, which gave us a nuanced view of what users need at each stage.

From the research, we built persona cards for our ideal platform customers. The most useful thing to come out of this exercise was the idea of carbon maturity levels. It gave us a simple lens for deciding which users to serve first, and it stuck around well past the sprint. Each card recorded what the persona was trying to achieve and where they got stuck.

I interviewed our science advisors about how they work with customers on decarbonization strategies. Their day-to-day reality became the ground truth for our solutions and kept the platform ideas honest about what the science work actually involves.

I mapped the actors involved in a decarbonization engagement, then used the map to collect feedback from the cross-functional team. We distilled that feedback into “How Might We” statements covering both customer and internal pain points, which gave the sketching session its prompts.

With the HMW statements as prompts, the team sketched a wide range of possible solutions. The sketches worked as a visual brainstorm and surfaced several feature concepts we carried forward.

I pulled the strongest ideas into a single flowchart showing how the features could work together. It became the backbone of a candidate six-month roadmap for the vertical: not a commitment, but a concrete picture of what building this product would involve.

I closed the week by wireframing the key screens. They made the concepts tangible for stakeholders and anchored the discussions about feasibility and next steps that followed.

Challenges During the Sprint

Two things got difficult mid-sprint: scope, and stakeholder time.

Managing Scope and Focus

The challenge: By the end of day one, we had surfaced far more gaps and opportunities than a one-week sprint could touch. Left unchecked, that breadth would have stalled us.

My approach:

• I raised it with the team right away and we talked through the options openly.
• We picked one long-term goal and drew the line there.
• We documented why, expecting to have to justify the choice later.
• Everything we cut went into a backlog instead of the bin.

The outcome: We kept our momentum and finished the week with something concrete. The goal we chose sat at the intersection of customer needs and business objectives, and the backlog preserved the rest for later.

Maximizing Limited Stakeholder Availability

The challenge: Our science advisors were key stakeholders with full calendars. We had to get real insight out of very short sessions.

My approach:

• I researched their roles before the interviews so we would not spend their time on basics.
• We wrote down our assumptions about their process and pain points ahead of time.
• Each interview had a tight structure: targeted questions and scenarios, no open-ended discussion.
• In the room, we focused on confirming or breaking our assumptions.

The outcome: We got what we needed in short sessions and the advisors stayed engaged, which mattered later when we needed their eyes on the sketches.

Outcomes and Impact

The sprint aligned a brand-new team in a week and gave leadership a clear-eyed view of what a decarbonization product would take. The carbon maturity concept outlived the project: it was iterated on and folded into the company’s strategic thinking. The work also brought the advisory and platform teams closer together, which paid off well beyond this project.

In the end, the company decided not to build the vertical. The sprint had produced a candidate roadmap, but it also gave leadership a grounded view of the investment required, and other business factors weighed against it. The team was dissolved shortly after, around the time our Product Manager left. I would rather run a one-week sprint that informs a no-go than spend two quarters building toward one.

I moved to the “Measure” workstream and kept working the same way. Over the next seven months, that work contributed to:

Lessons

Design Sprints work, but only when you reshape them for the people in the room. I have run enough design processes over the years to know which phases to keep and which to drop, and that judgment mattered more here than the method itself.

A Design Sprint is only as good as its fit with the people in the room.

The other thing this project sharpened was translation. My background as a consultant and founder helped me speak the language of product, engineering, and science colleagues, and that shared language is what kept a brand-new team moving in the same direction.

Shared language, not process, is what gets a new team moving in the same direction.