Evergrow

Evergrow bundled small tax credits from Commercial & Industrial clean energy developers for large buyers. A key value proposition was efficient diligence at scale.

Project costs process

1. Developers provide project costs & documentation
2. Evergrow organizes and sends to a third party accountant
3. Accountant confirms eligibility in a cost segregation report

This establishes the value of the project for all major parties.

Talking to internal experts, reviewing email threads and participating in calls showed that small clean energy developers faced real barriers to delivering an accurate list of costs & documentation

• Record-keeping was inconsistent. Documentation could be held by third-party contractors, construction departments, or finance teams — not always the person in contact with Evergrow.
• Tax credit rules are complex. Evergrow was doing a lot of education over email and phone calls.
• Costs were discovered incrementally. Each new cost or missing document uncovered during a call could trigger weeks of delays while developers chased down final paperwork.

Wearing a design hat, I started by exploring how to best structure the cost intake experience itself. I sketched four different approaches in FigJam, ranging in how much structure and guidance we'd provide upfront.

I also sketched out the overall user flow, integrating this new feature into the existing platform.

Streamlined user flows can only be created on top of a strong, consistent internal process. I collaborated closely with our tax credit finance expert to understand all of the work that needed to be accomplished. We negotiated a standardized process that could accommodate the majority of projects.

I documented this in a swimlane diagram, which we used for further refinement. It also became a map for implementation planning.

Created a mid-fidelity prototype to share with trusted customers

View Figma prototype →

This prototype featured a document side-by-side for quick cost verification, progressive disclosure of detailed cost questions and a confirmation screen with total expected tax credit value.

Results?
Developers responded positively to inline guidance and final value calculation, but we observed areas of confusion:

Simple form UI, backed by detailed rules

• Progressive disclosure: Follow-up questions appeared only for actual project costs
• Simple & sharable: worksheet format was easily sharable with other departments. In context help made the experience more self serve
• Dynamic documentation requirements calculated with new cost threshold standards, eliminating follow up requests

Traded a longer process for a simpler experience

An ideal customer solution would tailor the form to each project's specific circumstances, but this complex logic was out of scope for a V1.

Instead, we did the next best thing: identifying two high impact questions that internal experts could reliably answer that would streamline developer information asks. This better leveraged internal experts in a way that was worth the additional product complexity and added process steps.

This case study outlines the developer experience, but the complete feature also included flows for internal experts as well as external accountants. Documentation and handoff to engineering was a significant task.

I wrote a series of PRDs and collaborated closely with our lead engineer to organize the execution of feature work.