Once vehicle-to-grid worked as a technology and service, customers still had no way to find out whether their home, their location or their current vehicle could support it, and there was no point in the buying or ownership journey where they could sign up.

People who had tried to coordinate a car manufacturer, a charger installer and an energy provider themselves described being dropped by all three. My job was to turn that into one clear journey, with Nissan taking responsibility from start to finish.

Nissan Energy was preparing to launch a conversational assistant for EV and home energy queries, running retrieval-augmented generation against internal documentation. That documentation had accumulated across regional teams for years in inconsistent formats, with overlapping and contradictory guidance between markets. Left as it was, the model would retrieve conflicting instructions for the same fault and deliver them confidently to customers already stuck mid-installation.

Dealer handovers were capped at an hour when properly explaining the technology in newer models took three or more. High dealership turnover meant staff training rarely stuck, and printed manuals were static and disconnected from how people actually learn. Only 7% of website traffic reached the owner section against 93% for prospective buyers.

Research showed supporters wanted to know what a specific donation actually did, in concrete terms, and nothing in the giving journey told them. The same gap existed internally: fundraising, campaigns and brand were planning against assumed audiences. Meanwhile the sector was moving away from the imagery and language it had leaned on for decades, and how to represent people honestly without reducing them had no settled answer.

Markets, regions and functions each held a partial view of the customer and no shared definition of the journey connecting them. Day-to-day decisions were made locally with no line of sight to the end-to-end experience, and previous alignment attempts had run into legacy structures and entrenched ways of working. There was also no tooling capable of building and maintaining journeys at that scale.

COVID-19 closed dealerships, and the entire vehicle purchase journey depended on being inside one. Every stage of a traditionally offline, heavily regulated sale had to move online at speed, across markets with different legal, retail and localisation requirements, then be handed to regional teams who would run it without central support.

Public charging authentication depended on cards, apps and accounts that varied by network, so whether a driver could charge came down to which operator happened to own the post in front of them. Solving it required a single authentication experience agreed across vehicle manufacturers, charge point operators and mobility service providers, none of whom shared systems, standards or incentives.

Two organisations operating where imprecise language carries real consequences, neither with a house standard for it. At Great Ormond Street, clinical procedures had to be explained to frightened families accurately and humanely. At Nissan, a global brand with every market writing in its own voice needed its first unified copy and content guidelines.

An adapted Nissan LEAF running LIDAR and RADAR on public roads in Greenwich, carrying first-time passengers who had no way to read it. When a human driver brakes unexpectedly you interpret it through body language and the traffic ahead. None of that is available in a driverless car, and discomfort peaked at exactly the moment the vehicle made a decision the passenger could not anticipate.