Cecil.earth

Cecil is a seed stage startup, founded after the Black Summer bushfires by a team motivated to be part of the climate solution.

I joined as Head of Design to lead product experience and brand as the business sought product-market fit.

Generic tools don’t support the method-specific implementation and operations of nature based projects

Nature asset and NBS project managers must ensure project methodologies are being followed, track projected and approved inventory (e.g. carbon credits), collect and analyse environmental data, manage project budgets and costs, and ensure tasks for a range of specialists are being completed methodically across multiple, geographically distributed projects.

To solve these problems today they use a range of generic tools that become disorganised and lead to delays, reporting challenges, and increase project risk.

The Cecil Workspace keeps natural assets and nature based projects under control

Cecil brings project data and operations into a single workspace, with features for task management, site data, credit inventory, pipeline tracking, and project assessment.

I implemented a stable, yet flexible design process to manage diverse product requirements.

As a design team of one, working directly with founders and customers, and a distributed engineering team, I developed a design process to prioritise and accommodate larger projects, incremental feature improvements, and necessary design system updates.

Every 6 weeks, we took stock and reprioritised the projects for the following 6 weeks. This allowed us to be responsive to customer feedback and maintain momentum in research or execution for new features.

A substantial strategic shift necessitated deep qualitative research to build empathy for a new specialist end-user

Organically, a new insight emerged that the real source of teams’ problems, was the data workflows that underpin every stage of the project.

This led to a new product vision: to be a data platform for nature, focused on simplifying the data analysis workflows of nature teams.

A challenge across the team, in designing the new product direction was building intuition for customer needs at the intersection of environmental science and geospatial data analysis expertise.

I led numerous research initiatives to understand the jobs to be done, workflows, and key frictions around data acquisition, pre-processing, and analysis.

Cecil’s product positioning and brand identity needed to be reviewed, in light of the new product vision

Taking a lean approach, with support from an external contractor, I led the team through a rebranding exercise. A new logo, colour and typography system as well as a versatile graphic motif were developed, forming the foundation of a strong, data-oriented visual language.

In parallel, I led a product positioning initiative to define the new value proposition, in relation to the problems with existing alternatives, the differentiated value of the solution and the market category it fits within.