Measuring Emissions
Making supply chain carbon visible - and opening a new market
- Role
- Design Lead
- Team
- ~30 designers, PMs, and engineers across 3 teams
- Timeline
- 12 weeks · Q3 2023
TL;DR
Led 0→1 discovery that became Indigo's primary strategic bet for 2023–2024.
Self-started: defined scope, recruited team, drove research and design end-to-end.
Built the business case for 3.6× ARR growth (seven → eight figures)
Shipped MVP that landed six-figure revenue in the first three months
The problem
Indigo Ag was a late-stage climate tech company helping large food companies decarbonize supply chains. The open question wasn't only product-it was market: is there a new addressable tier below enterprise, and what would it take to reach them?
Most people think carbon means energy: fuels, efficiency. For food companies, ingredients-not factories or trucks-are roughly 70% of total emissions. Nestlé's public footprint breaks it down: Scope 3 ingredient sourcing is 71.4% of the whole. You can't plan reductions without a baseline. The industry had accountability without visibility.
Source: Nestlé climate reporting
“Working on how to get our grocery products to net zero carbon by 2040 - and right now we don't even have a baseline.”
Discovery
I self-started the effort: defined scope, made the case to the VP of Product, recruited a UX researcher and PM, then ran discovery as player-coach-scripting, facilitating, synthesizing-while keeping stakeholders aligned.
Generative research (moderated interviews with supply chain actors and internal SMEs) mixed with sacrificial concept testing: rough sketches meant to be thrown away. That gave people something concrete to react to, cut weeks off learning, and surfaced wrong assumptions before engineering spent a dollar.
The pivot
The leading concept was map-based. Emissions tie to geography; buyers close to the farm got it immediately.
With enterprise food contacts, pushback was immediate. Those buyers don't think in regions-they think in supplier lists. They source finished ingredients (corn meal, vegetable oil) from vendors, not from places on a map. The map was the wrong mental model.
We shipped two modes instead of forcing one: a geospatial map for grain buyers and exploration, and a table for enterprises managing large supplier lists. That wasn't scope creep-it was research doing its job. Catching the mismatch at sketch fidelity let the team reprioritize without a rewrite.
The bigger idea
The product wasn't only measurement-it connected both sides of a market that couldn't transact before. A grain aggregator can see that their corn carries a lower emissions footprint than a competitor's; that signal reaches CPG brands actively sourcing lower-carbon ingredients. Legible data is what opened the tier below classic enterprise deals.
What we built
- A way to define and model a supply chain
- Emissions data aligned with industry expectations for formal crediting
- In-product education on the science so people trust and act on the numbers
Impact
- Built the business case for 3.6× ARR growth (seven → eight figures)
- Six-figure MVP revenue in the first three months
- Became Indigo's primary strategic bet for 2023–2024
- Mapping component work here accelerated later geospatial products
Reflection
This was as much market-making as product design. The hardest part wasn't the UI-it was holding a clear strategic frame while scope and stakeholders grew across three teams. The layoff cut the story short; the early traction was real.