From Regulatory Shift to Validated Product Direction
How I helped translate an emerging compliance requirement into a concrete platform concept, validated with prospective customers and scoped for MVP.
BIOFUELS COMPLIANCE PLATFORM
Senior Product Designer
Small core exploratory team of executives and me
ROLE
CONTEXT
SCOPE
0-to-1 concept vision,
validation, MVP transition
TEAM
VP Biofuels, VP Product, me
01 – OVERVIEW
A regulatory shift created an opportunity to expand into a new market.
When new sustainability compliance requirements began taking shape for the biofuels industry, Indigo saw an opportunity to extend its existing platform capabilities into a new workflow. I worked alongside Indigo's VP of Biofuels and VP of Product to determine whether that opportunity was real and, if so, what a product response could look like.
Working from an initial market hypothesis, I helped shape the concept, validate it with prospective customers, and move the effort from early exploration into pilot definition and MVP planning.
02 – THE CHALLENGE
Emerging regulations created a documentation and coordination burden at every link in the supply chain.
New requirements were expected to require biofuel producers to document feedstock origin and sustainability criteria. But the burden wouldn't sit in one place: it would stretch across growers, aggregators, and producers, requiring new coordination, documentation, and traceability work with no established digital infrastructure to support it.
What made it especially complex was that physical feedstock needed to stay tied to digital evidence as it moved through the chain, creating a traceability challenge on top of the compliance burden.
03 – THE INSIGHT
This wasn't a reporting problem at the end of the workflow. It was an information-flow problem across the entire chain.
Treating it as a narrow reporting tool would have underserved the real need. Reframing it as an end-to-end compliance and traceability workflow changed both the scope of the concept and how customers responded to it when we brought it back to them.
04 – THE SOLUTION
An end-to-end compliance and traceability platform built on Indigo's existing capabilities.
The concept centered on helping supply-chain stakeholders collect required sustainability information, organize supporting evidence, connect it to physical feedstock, and pass it downstream with more structure and visibility.
A key part of the solution was reuse: the concept explored how Indigo's existing Carbon and Source platform capabilities could be adapted for this new use case rather than built from scratch, reducing risk and accelerating the path to market.
04 – PRODUCT
Concept screens from the compliance platform vision.
Mobile grower workflow
Simple 3-step guided data collection experience aimed at reducing grower data collection burden to ~30 sec.
Supply chain enablement & traceability
Share, trade, and track certified feedstock across the supply chain..
Agronomic Insights
Visibility into regenerative practice adoption and cropping history across sourcing region.
05 – IMPACT
From market hypothesis to validated product direction with pilot planning underway.
Validated customer interest
Prospective customers confirmed the compliance burden was real and significant, and responded positively to the concept's ability to reduce it.
Evolved from hypothesis to product direction
The refined prototype gave both customers and internal stakeholders something concrete enough to react to, building internal confidence and alignment.
Expanded and clarified stakeholder model
Customer conversations revealed the supply chain was broader than initial framing, sharpening the product scope and feature priorities.
Pilot planning and MVP scope underway
Early engineering alignment and a functional proof point for a core component gave the team a credible path toward an initial product version.
06 – MY CONTRIBUTION
What I owned
Opportunity framing and initial concept development
Stakeholder system mapping and workflow definition
Supporting the transition from exploration to MVP scope
Customer validation planning and synthesis
Prototype development and iteration across concept stages
Collaboration with VP-level stakeholders on product direction