Project Overview
Berkshire Hathaway Energy Company, a diversified energy holding company generating power from coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and other renewable resources, partnered with Wunderman Thompson Apps to transform their digital customer experience. This ambitious initiative unified four distinct affiliate utility companies - Pacific Power, NV Energy, MidAmerican Energy, and Rocky Mountain Power -under a single React Native codebase and cohesive user experience.
Our team developed native iOS and Android applications serving 5.2 million daily customers, consolidating four unique brand identities while respecting each affiliate's regional requirements and operational differences. This comprehensive mobile platform enabled customers to manage their entire utility relationship-from service setup and billing to outage reporting and payment arrangements-exclusively within the app, eliminating the need to navigate between mobile and web experiences.
Project Scope
The platform rebuild encompassed a complete digital transformation, replacing legacy affiliate-specific applications with a unified mobile solution that balanced brand consistency with affiliate-specific regulatory and operational requirements. Our approach centered on creating scalable, reusable components that could be customized for each affiliate while maintaining code efficiency and accelerating time-to-market.
My Role
I served as Product Manager and strategic liaison between Berkshire Hathaway Energy's four affiliate leadership teams and our cross-functional development organization — responsible for translating competing priorities into a unified product vision serving 5.2 million daily users across distinct regulatory territories.
I owned the end-to-end product roadmap, leading discovery sessions with each affiliate to consolidate requirements and accommodate the compliance mandates unique to each operating territory. Key areas of complexity included outage mapping filters, authentication protocols, service site configuration, billing preferences, and state-specific regulatory requirements — resulting in a flexible architecture that supported regulatory divergence while maximizing code reusability.
I translated approved designs and functional requirements into detailed user stories and acceptance criteria, maintaining a backlog that sustained our sprint cadence. Throughout delivery I managed stakeholder expectations across both our Agile team and the client's waterfall organization, adapting release planning and communication cadences to keep both sides aligned.
I represented the engagement at quarterly business reviews, traveling on-site to present project timelines, milestone progress, and forward-looking delivery plans directly to BHE leadership.
Engagement Approach
Unified Codebase, Affiliate-Aware Architecture
We structured development around a single React Native codebase designed for reusability from the start. Rather than building four separate applications, we created a scalable component system configurable per affiliate — accommodating regulatory, brand, and operational differences without duplicating engineering effort. This architecture decision drove how we gathered requirements, structured user stories, and sequenced delivery across the platform.
Parallel Track Development
Component specifications were written to be intentionally flexible — defined well enough to build against, but structured to evolve as API capabilities matured. This allowed front-end and back-end progress to advance simultaneously without either track becoming a blocker.
Phased, Multi-Affiliate Validation
We designated Pacific Power as our pilot and lead affiliate, using it to establish baseline patterns, validate core workflows, and pressure-test the component system before expanding to the broader portfolio. Design reviews with subsequent affiliates were structured around a targeted question: does anything here work differently for you? — surfacing edge cases driven by regulatory, operational, or brand differences without starting from scratch each time.
Where affiliate-specific variations were identified, we documented them explicitly within our requirements and user stories, creating a clear reference for how each brand diverged from the baseline. This documentation approach compounded in value as we iterated — each successive affiliate moved faster through discovery and validation because the shared foundation was already established and the delta work was clearly scoped.
Adapted Agile Delivery
Our sprint cadence was modified to accommodate longer client approval cycles while preserving iterative development principles. Stakeholder communication was structured to build client confidence in Agile incrementally — shifting organizational buy-in over time rather than requiring it upfront.
Challenges
Development kicked off before backend APIs existed — meaning feature specifications and user flows had to be defined against infrastructure that was still being architected. We established collaborative frameworks with BHE's technical teams to enable parallel progress, defining component specifications flexible enough to evolve as API capabilities came online.
Each affiliate operated under distinct state regulatory frameworks governing billing, customer data, and service provisions — meaning features that appeared straightforward required entirely different workflows and business logic beneath. Payment arrangements for Pacific Power, NV Energy, and MidAmerican Energy each carried unique compliance requirements that had to be reconciled within a single codebase.
Our Agile framework and the client's waterfall approval process created friction in sprint planning, stakeholder reviews, and decision velocity. We adapted our delivery model with modified ceremony structures and deliberate expectation-setting — the mechanics of how we bridged that gap are covered in Engagement Approach below.
Unifying four utility brands — each with decades of customer relationships and distinct visual identities — into a single application required careful navigation of stakeholder sensitivities and brand equity concerns. The design system needed to feel modern and cohesive while preserving the brand signals each affiliate's customers recognized and trusted, extending to terminology, feature prioritization, and regional service approaches across the portfolio.
Business Artifacts
Product Screens
Lessons Learned
Starting development before backend API infrastructure was established created avoidable inefficiencies in early sprint cycles. A structured client readiness assessment during pre-engagement discovery — covering infrastructure dependencies alongside feature requirements — would have allowed the team to sequence work more effectively from day one.
Designating Pacific Power as the lead affiliate wasn't just a practical sequencing decision — it was a strategic one. Establishing baseline patterns, validating core workflows, and surfacing edge cases through a single affiliate first created compounding efficiency gains for every affiliate that followed. The lesson: identify your forcing function early and be intentional about why you're starting there.
Explicitly capturing how each affiliate diverged from the established baseline — within requirements, user stories, and design documentation — transformed what could have been repetitive discovery work into a reusable knowledge base. Documentation done well isn't overhead; it's the mechanism that makes iteration faster and onboarding cheaper.
Affiliate-specific compliance requirements that surfaced late in the process created downstream rework that earlier discovery would have prevented. Regulatory and operational divergence should be treated as a first-class discovery workstream — not an edge case to be resolved during design review.