Tulli — Venture Creation, Early Stage

This was a venture built from scratch inside Shell's digital innovation team. The question at the start wasn't "what should we build" — it was "is there a real problem here worth solving, and for whom?" Tulli was an early-stage wind energy venture, and my job was to find out whether the opportunity was real before anyone committed serious resource to building it.

I led the product work from the earliest stage: customer discovery, pain point mapping, and understanding where the genuine gap in the market was. That meant getting in front of potential customers, running structured interviews, and being willing to challenge assumptions — including the founding hypothesis — when the evidence pointed elsewhere.

From the discovery work, I developed the initial product concept and validation roadmap: what we'd build first, what we'd test, and what success would look like at each stage before moving forward. I also built the business case that secured $1.5M in internal funding to take the venture further.

A funded venture with a validated product direction, built on real customer evidence rather than internal conviction. Received a Special Recognition Award from Shell for the work. It was also one of the formative experiences that taught me how to think about product from first principles — before there's a roadmap, a team, or a brief.