The product workshops started with EV driver behaviour, not with software features. What was the actual friction in the charging experience? Where did drivers lose time, feel uncertain, or abandon a location? The interviews surfaced a clear, consistent answer: the anxiety of arriving at a location only to find every charger occupied.
This was the gap. Not faster charging, not better payment UI, not a loyalty programme. The thing EV drivers wanted most — and that no competitor in the Polish market was delivering reliably — was certainty before they left. The ability to look at their phone, see an available charging spot, reserve it, and know that when they arrived it would be waiting for them.
That insight drove every subsequent decision. The product wasn’t “a mobile app for EV charging.” The product was the answer to one specific question: will there be a spot when I arrive?
Delivering on the reservation promise required solving a problem that most app-only competitors couldn’t touch: the physical world. A reservation that exists only in software is not a reservation — it’s a suggestion. To make the guarantee real, the app had to be connected to the actual hardware.
We designed and built three tightly integrated components: the driver-facing mobile app, an application server managing reservations and state, and a proprietary communication module connecting the digital reservation to a physical barrier at the charging spot. When a driver reserves a spot, the barrier locks. When the driver arrives and initiates the session through the app, the barrier lifts.
The POWER app launched with a feature set that its competitors in the Polish market weren’t positioned to replicate quickly — because delivering it required controlling both the software and the physical infrastructure simultaneously. That technical moat was the business outcome.