# BP

> A discovery project for BP where I led a team of designers. We researched fleet managers at large enterprises (DHL-scale, hundreds of thousands of vehicles) and prototyped how BP could help them decarbonise their fleets. The discovery set the roadmap for an early-stage product BP took further internally.

**Question:** How does an energy giant design for decarbonisation?  
**Tags:** Service Design, Energy, Enterprise  
**Focus:** Design Lead  
**Case study:** https://www.sebastian-nause-blueml.com/bp.html  
**External:** https://www.bp.com

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How do you decarbonise a hundred thousand vehicles?

Discovery and prototyping for BP: finding where it could genuinely help enterprise fleets go lower-carbon.

## At a glance

- **Client:** BP: fleet decarbonisation for business customers
- **My role:** Design Lead: led a team of designers through discovery research & prototyping
- **The people:** Fleet managers at large enterprises
- **What happened:** Set the roadmap & strategic direction for the early-stage product

## The brief

**BP's path to lower carbon runs through its customers' fleets.**

What could BP build to help its business customers decarbonise the vans, trucks and cars they run? An early-stage product needed a direction grounded in what fleets actually need.

## The scale

**Enterprises like DHL put hundreds of thousands of vehicles on the road.**

At that scale, decarbonisation isn't a purchase, it's an operational overhaul. Which is exactly why fleet managers hesitate.

*Image caption: Fleet scale is city scale - and so is the carbon.*

## What we learned

**The real obstacle wasn't the vehicles - it was the decision.**

One insight outweighed the rest. For a fleet manager, going electric means weighing resale value, range, charging and the upheaval to drivers' day, all at once, full of unknown unknowns, with no clear way to weigh them.

**The key insight:** Fleet managers had reasons to switch. What they lacked was a way to make the decision well.

## What we built

**So we prototyped a way to make that decision easier.**

The insight pointed to a clear direction: a tool to help a fleet manager weigh the whole transition, resale value, range, charging, driver impact, in one place. We turned it into mockups fast, concrete enough to react to.

*Image caption: A hard decision, made easier to weigh.*

## Testing it

**Tested against a fleet manager's daily reality.**

We took the mockups back to the fleet managers. Did this actually help them weigh the decision: what worked, what didn't, and what was still missing.

*Image caption: Feedback from the people who run the fleets, not just the stakeholders.*

## Where it landed

**The prototype became the product's first direction.**

The tested mockups worked both ways: fleet managers saw their decision get easier, and BP stakeholders saw where the product could fit.

The work set the roadmap and strategic direction for BP's early-stage product, grounded in what fleets actually need.

## The quote

> "What we delivered together in the timeframe was remarkable, highly praised by stakeholders and across the wider organisation ... Sebastian brought excellence in service design thinking and execution to the project and a lot of positive energy."

**Sven Laqua, PhD FRSA**
Head of Design & Research, Laqua Consulting

## Looking back

### What stays with me

We treat a transition like this as a technical problem: infrastructure, the grid, the energy source. But it always comes back to people: how they'll live with the change, and why they resist it. The human factor is the part that really decides it, and that is exactly where design earns its place.