Build in Public: Workshopping a Challenge Statement

To get some guard rails for our new Renewable Energy Storage Venture, we workshopped a Challenge Statement together.?

We used SHIFT GPT of course. I’ll be frank: After completing this in a little under an hour, we all genuinely wondered how we used to create Challenge Statements without SHIFT. (The answer is: We used our brains. It was hard and painful.)

But first - Why a challenge statement?

A great challenge statement accomplishes 3 things:?

1. Establishes the aspiration or moon shot the venture attempts
2. Points to some early hypotheses that gives the venture a starting point for customer pain point interviews
3. Provides some guard rails (so the venture is not trying to be all things to all people)

Step 1: SHIFT asked us, What is the business domain that we’re focused on? Renewable energy storage, if you might remember.?

Shift asked us to clarify – if we were focusing on a specific type of energy storage, or a particular segment of the market. And what drove our interest in this domain. Tech? Market growth? Environmental impact?

We settled on no specific type, but the industrial, commercial, utility, large-scale segments. What drives us is technological innovation, environmental impact, market growth potential and long-term profitability. We are looking for a disruptive solution in business terms or a today-technology applied differently.?

Awesome, SHIFT told us. SHIFT gave us a bold, aspirational vision for the future state of the Renewable Energy domain, namely:?

“In the near future, renewable energy storage solutions have become highly efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally sustainable. These solutions are easily scalable, making renewable energy fully reliable and available on-demand to industrial, commercial and utility-scale users worldwide. We’ve seen the emergence of breakthrough storage technologies and business models that have dramatically lowered costs and environmental impacts. These innovations have unlocked the full potential of renewable energy, making it the backbone of global energy systems. Energy storage now, enables a seamless transition between different renewable energy sources, ensuring energy security and supporting global decarbonization efforts.”

We settled on the following expanded vision?

Enabling any customer to implement a solution that they know is safe, profitable, reliable, easy to implement, truly sustainable, optimized to their use cases and offering high volumes of energy. Decentralized energy distribution system with emerging and future technologies would play a key role and make energy utility companies as intermediates obsolete. Democratizing the sources and usage of energy for houses, buildings, cars, etc.

Now that energy consumption is democratized, this would enable new data driven business models as we know much more about neighboring communities. More transparency on where the energy comes from. Energy autonomy would increase decreasing dependency on hostile nations to Europe energy import.?

A refined vision was returned by SHIFT:?

“In this future, renewable energy storage solutions have evolved to such an extent that they empower any customer, be it a homeowner, a business or a community, to become a part of an integrated, decentralised energy distribution system.?

This system is profitable, easy to implement, safe, reliable, and, above all, sustainable, capable of supporting high volumes of energy demand across various applications. Emerging and future technologies have been pivotal in eliminating the need for traditional utility companies to act as intermediaries, essentially democratising energy production and consumption.?

This new model has made every building house and vehicle, not just a consumer of energy, but a potential producer and store, contributing to a vast interconnected energy network.?

The transparency afforded by this system has changed how communities understand and value their energy with data driven insights, fostering stronger, more resilient local economies, energy autonomy has surged, reducing Europe's dependency on foreign energy imports, and therefore, by enhancing geopolitical stability.?

Moreover, this shift has catalysed the development of new business models that leverage the immense amount of data generated by this decentralised network, offering unprecedented insights into energy patterns, preferences and potential savings.?

This future is not just about energy security, but also about creating a sustainable, inclusive and economically vibrant ecosystem around renewable energy.”

YES. That’s what we were looking for.?

SHIFT then returned 10 “How might we” Challenge statements. The one we loved the most was:?

We asked SHIFT to combine it with some elements on data and tech. Here is the challenge statement SHIFT suggested:

We further workshopped this draft challenge statement in Miro and after much discussion settled on the following:?

How might we democratize energy creation, storage and usage

For citizens, businesses, and communities

In a way that is scalable, adaptable to different user circumstances, leverages new technologies, and data analytics

So that we enhance energy resilience, reduce carbon emissions, and support community-wide sustainability goals.

Thoughts?