Product Management, ClimateTech
ClearBlue Vantage
After finishing my degree in April 2023, I decided to skip the grad trip route for an opportunity to build in climate tech. Having spent the previous two summers in consulting, I was eager to join a startup that valued moving fast and taking risks. I became ClearBlue Markets’ first junior product hire, working alongside a director to shape the org’s build culture and accelerate the development and release of new products.
Role: Product Manager
Duration: May 2023 – August 2023 (4 months)
Team: Product Manager, Product Designer, 2x Engineers, 2x Carbon Advisors
Skills: Communication, Execution, Product Docs, User Research
I. Overview
Context
ClearBlue Markets is a climate tech startup that helps organizations (industrial emitters, institutional investors, tech giants) achieve their decarbonization goals through participation in the Compliance and Voluntary Carbon Markets. Its flagship offering, Vantage, is a web platform that assists clients in improving their decision-making through three product verticals: Market Intelligence, Position Manager, and Offset Price Discovery. Think of Vantage as the Bloomberg Terminal to the carbon markets.
The Challenge
ClearBlue was initially founded as an advisory firm with a tech MVP to support its engagements. Over time, however, clients increasingly gravitated towards the platform's self-servicing capabilities, reducing their reliance on human advisors to perform manual tasks such as updating data and performing calculations. Recognizing this shift in customer interest, the company raised a Series A to scale its engineering efforts.
Despite progress in refining its MVP, ClearBlue still needed a product function to unify the vision and objectives of its Leadership, Technology, and Advisory teams. Customer feedback indicated that the MVP experience was starting to grow outdated/inflexible, and the company lacked a go-to-market strategy to commercialize this offering.
Given these challenges and pain points, I approached my internship with the following question:
"How might we build and launch the next iteration of Vantage to accelerate ClearBlue's transition into a technology-driven company supported effectively by its services?"
II. My Role
My Approach
Over the summer, I managed two key initiatives: coordinating Vantage’s v2 launch and leading the discovery and solutioning for Position Manager, which would be integrated later in the platform. As the two projects ran under different timelines, I approached my work with the following mindset:
Managing Different Altitudes: One skill I quickly picked up was the ability to switch between detailed, in-the-weeds execution and high-level strategy. While launch coordination involved traditional project management tasks like facilitating meetings and removing blockers, Position Manager required a more analytical approach to identify customer pain points, validate ideas, and prioritize backlog items. I had to adapt my PM style relative to the context of my work throughout the day.
Defining Your Assumptions: Given the complexity of the carbon markets compared to my previous experiences, I frequently ran product reviews with our advisory team to validate important decisions. I would begin each meeting by voicing my understanding of the topic to calibrate on the principles to my thinking. This approach created a feedback loop where I gradually became more familiar with the industry and in turn gained more trust with these subject matter experts.
My Process
A. Upskilling and Exploration
My first few weeks at ClearBlue involved ramping up my knowledge of the carbon markets, focusing on the jurisdictions relevant to Position Manager (Ontario EPS, Quebec WCI, etc.). To achieve this, I self-studied industry operating guidelines and scheduled 1-on-1s with team analysts. I documented my learnings into a knowledge base, which was shared with fellow designers and developers working on the product.
During the discovery phase, I actively participated in UXR sessions to understand customers’ needs and pain points with the current solution. I synthesized meeting minutes, tagged insights on Dovetail, and partnered with my director to prioritize findings informing the requirements.
I produced two key artifacts from this phase: a PRD outlining the problem space, opportunities, and technical requirements for delivering Position Manager, and a value proposition document highlighting customer expectations for the next iteration of Vantage. I presented these artifacts to the appropriate team leads (e.g., VP Offsets, VP Advisory, VP Market Intelligence) to gain buy-in for our upcoming roadmap.
B. Feature Design
With the value proposition and business objectives defined for Position Manager, the next phase involved collaborating with my design partner to explore product concepts. I consolidated user insights and feedback across various sources to write requirements and build low-fidelity wireframes. While some of these specs were MVP enhancements, others introduced net new features like risk exposure metrics and dashboard widgets. By facilitating frequent product reviews and design crits with XFN, my role aligned stakeholders on the product's vision, roadmap, and delivery timeline.
C. Launch Coordination
With most of the specs handed over to design, I shifted my focus towards preparing the broader Vantage platform for its v2 launch. To enable real-time market updates, the new platform would first need to be supported by a headless CMS that could be updated by any advisory staff rather than filing a request to engineering. I prepared our teams internally by developing educational materials and running training sessions. I also supported our developers by defining access permissions, identifying dynamic content on the platform, and tagging content owners/backup owners for each component.
D. Testing and Insights
As we approached deployment, I conducted user acceptance testing for over 50 flows and wrote placeholder content for dashboard pages. I filed bug reports, triaged support tickets, and collaborated with a backend developer to resolve automation issues with certain functionalities.
As a separate initiative, I implemented Pendo to enable product analytics within Vantage. Within Pendo, I built an onboarding flow for the v2 design, allowing our sales team to monitor early user activations. I also designed custom paths to identify errors and implemented funnels to optimize conversion into desired features like our new Market Intelligence charts. Finally, I integrated an NPS widget for direct customer satisfaction tracking. These efforts laid the groundwork for making targeted, data-driven product improvements.
My Impact
Looking back on my internship, I would describe my impact through three vectors:
Product Culture: During a recent catch-up with former colleagues, I discovered that many of the artifacts and rituals I introduced during my internship were still in practice. For example, I established a new system for tagging user insights based on emotions, needs, and suggestions, and led an interactive workshop on writing user stories. These resources are still being referenced by the team.
Product Enablement: I managed two integrations within Vantage to enable self-service content updates and product analytics, enhancing efficiency for our internal platform users (Advisory, Engineering, Data Science).
Product Execution: My work on Vantage and Position Manager helped drive the company’s product roadmap and resulted in a go-live decision for both initiatives, creating upselling opportunities for 200+ clients (Deloitte, Bain Capital, Suncor, Macquarie Group etc.)
III. Reflections
Takeaways
Navigating Imposter Syndrome: Joining an organization surrounded by seasoned experts in sustainability, finance, and economics was daunting as a new grad. To overcome self-doubt, I focused on contributing my unique perspectives and skills while demonstrating my ability to quickly learn and apply new concepts.
Product in Theory vs. In Practice: Working at a startup showed me that PM frameworks often present a linear, idealized approach to product development. In reality, the journey involves layers of product debt, difficult tradeoffs, and stringent delivery timelines. The key is to remain customer-centric and tailor these frameworks to fit your team’s unique requirements.
Being as Direct as Possible: When writing product docs or exec briefs, bullet points almost always win. Ami Vora said it best: “Write whatever you need to write and then cut out almost all of it. What you really want to bring to any forum (...), is the minimal amount of information that you need to make a clean recommendation because then you are forced to be opinionated.”
Conclusion
My time at ClearBlue allowed me to collaborate with an incredibly talented team who trusted me, valued my input, and provided their support, despite having decades more experience in ESG, carbon, and sustainability. This internship also sharpened my ability to learn quickly and visualize ambiguous concepts to clarify my understanding— two of my most valuable strengths as a consultant today. Check out the eCommerce strategy project I worked on shortly after to see these skills in action.
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