Why I created my own Industry Brief for Fleet Electrification
For the past few months, I have been researching and compiling notes in an area of renewable energy that connects mobility with climate change. More specifically, I have been learning about how we need to transition the transportation sector away from internal combustion engines and fossil fuels to favor electric vehicles and a decarbonized grid instead. I am confident in saying this won’t be easy.
My path forward is much clearer now. I plan to join a company that is dedicated to advancing fleet electrification. I will employ my cumulative professional experience to address a very large problem and I intend to positively impact the planet at scale.
To get started, I need to persuade a company to hire me. To improve my chances, I decided to formalize my thoughts, frame the problem as I understand it, identify opportunities (primarily around software-based offerings - my expertise) and package that up into an Industry Brief.
Who am I to create a Brief?
In 4-5 years from now, I am convinced I will be an industry expert in this area. And I’m ok with that timeframe because if my predictions are correct, the world will have barely made a dent in the problem - but more on that later.
The point is, I am not that expert today. I recognize that. But I want to get into the club now.
One way I can get invited is to establish credibility by offering relevant perspectives, or minimally to be able to hold my own in a conversation with my (soon-to-be) peers. Until now, I have only been mostly in information gathering mode, collecting and synthesizing notes from dozens of articles, websites, white papers, podcasts, and conversations. To move forward, I decided to push myself to produce something authoritative. Something weightier.
I want to demonstrate that I am accurately thinking about this problem space and am able to spot good business opportunities. To do that, I am going to publish a brief.
Why a Brief?
I don’t know if there is a standard structure for a document like this, but the title communicates my motivation. I want to communicate useful information about this particular industry in a consumable format.
In building my Brief, I forced myself to think about my intended audience. I needed to make assumptions about where to start and finish. I had to decide how broad and how deep to go. I needed to build a strong narrative that the reader could follow. And I needed to create some urgency around the problems.
Who would likely read this?
What would they likely already know?
What new insights could I provide?
In short, the Brief format offered me a sufficient structure to start organizing my thoughts and be selective about the content I included.
I chose to build the Brief in PowerPoint for the following reasons:
I have acquired significant proficiency in slide presentation tools over the years.
When I come across opportunities to present the material to an audience, I have will have access to animation effects (employed judiciously :) to help better tell the story, as some of the slides are intentionally dense with text.
I know that it is easy to generate a separate read-only PDF document to more easily circulate with colleagues.
Completing my initial draft
As I suspected, it is taking time to summarize/distill my copious notes into something that holds together and sufficiently demonstrates something more than a cursory understanding of the topic.
I worked for many hours over several weeks and ultimately produced a first draft, pulling in everything from my Roam Research database (I talked about my growing graph database in an earlier post). I admittedly spent too much time prematurely thinking about formatting and polish as I fantasized about being called upon to share it at any moment. Wishful thinking indeed.
In the software product world, we often coach/console each other with this advice:
“if you aren’t nervous about releasing your feature/product, you’ve waited too long!”
I took that advice in this endeavor. I would certainly share this initial draft with ample disclaimers of course!
When I paused, I already had 40+ slides of content, although I would probably publish less than half of them in their current state. It is supposed to be a “brief” after all.
I shared it with some folks in my inner circle and heard the feedback I expected: “too long”, “you call this a brief?”, and “just boil it down for me” (shorthand for where’s the executive summary? or TL;DR).
Distilling it down
I ultimately did create a single slide that captures my current understanding of the problem space and the significant opportunities we have to tackle fleet electrification.
There is so much more to this story and I am enjoying building out the next version and strengthening the narrative. I will certainly be sharing a future draft here in the future.
What I am getting out of it
I feel like I am in a somewhat unique place. For the past 18 months, I have enjoyed the freedom to explore the entire area of renewable energy and to wander around looking for things that speak to me.
I know that as soon as I land that first gig, I will not have this luxury. I will likely have less freedom, and I will want to focus on the specific problems my company is trying to solve. I will want to learn about the markets we are targeting, the specific pain points of our customer base. I will want to build the best available solutions to advance the transition.
And that will mean less time to wander and more energy dedicated to becoming that industry expert.
Still, this exercise is advancing me down my path. I already feel more credible, more confident because now I can tell a good story. I am ready to engage. Keep that keynote speaker slot open in 2024!