Renewable energy · Enterprise digital transformation · 2016–2019
Compressing commercial solar design from days to 25 minutes
SunPower's commercial solar projects required technical design and configuration work that took hours or days per project, spread across sales, engineering, and installation teams who each held part of the picture. Skowak led UX architecture and product design for the digital platform that replaced it.
01
Problem
Designing a commercial solar installation meant reconciling physical site constraints, electrical engineering rules, product configuration logic, financing terms, and installation realities knowledge distributed across three divisions and sixteen-plus separate tools. No single person could see the whole system, so every project accumulated delay at each handoff.
02
Approach
Skowak mapped the operational domain end to end, then designed a CAD-style configuration environment (Helix) that encoded the engineering constraints directly into the design surface, so invalid configurations became impossible rather than caught later in review.
The wider work was architectural: connecting sales, system design, installation, support, inventory, and operations into one coherent product ecosystem rather than sixteen tools that each solved a fragment.
03
Impact
- Commercial solar design compressed from hours or days to 10–25 minutes
- Coordination improved across a 16+ product ecosystem spanning three divisions
- Also designed early AI-assisted operational support (the SOL chatbot) to help internal teams navigate dense product and process knowledge AI product work before the current wave
04
What made it work
The compression didn't come from a faster interface. It came from encoding the engineering rules into the design surface so that the expensive review-and-rework loop stopped happening. That's the same move that makes AI systems work: put the constraints where the work happens, not in a review step afterwards.
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What are you trying to build?
If you're evaluating where AI fits in your operation or you have a project stalled between demo and production, that's the conversation Skowak is built for.