Episode 2: Technology

Thanks for downloading the latest episode of Inside Octopus Energy, where the topic of conversation this time is the unique technology that sits behind our products and services that is helping us to deliver cheaper, greener energy. My name is Trudy Lewis and together with my co-host Russell Goldsmith, we're joined online by three of the team responsible for shaping and developing the Octopus Energy technology platform, the aptly named Cracken. Julia Ems is one of our front-end developers working on Cracken's API. And Ruby Mitchell is a senior operations manager supporting a wide range of partners who have licensed the Cracken technology to use for themselves. And so we'll come back to both of you guys shortly, but let's start this conversation with James Edison, one of the company's co-founders, our CTO, and would it be fair to say Cracken? I think it would be fair to say co-creator, just as the company has many people behind it. Cracken is the result of a team effort and we've had some great, you know, great people right from the outset working on Cracken. A piece of technology like Cracken needs to have designed at very many different levels. There's sort of a design of the functionality, there's also a design of the technology and the architecture, there's a team of people who've built that from the outside, from the outset. Well, before we dig deeper into the story of Cracken and how it's driving the business, let's bring Jillian Ruby into the conversation. So Jill, do you want to start by giving us a quick overview of your role in the team? Sure, so I joined the team about three years ago, back when we had just the two websites to look after, so we had up to this energy and we had Cracken and in those early days I was mostly concerned with trying to improve and build on the experience that customers have when they interact with us digitally, whether that's through the website or through emails and also to work with the opt team members to try and kind of give that same experience to Cracken. So opt have always had a massive influence about how the technology platform has evolved and that comes from working really closely both with people like James and people kind of designing it, but also from people like us who can help to kind of bring polish and improve the kind of user experience of the application. And my role's really evolved now from mostly looking at the opt for energy customers into developing kind of APIs and a white label experience that we can give clients so that we can help look after those customers as well. And how about yourself Ruby? So I joined four years ago actually as an energy specialist, so frontline ops and looking after customers and then kind of over the last four years I guess my role has changed quite a lot. So moving on to look after payments to transactions, collections, working with the tech team to build functionality for that. And then most recently been looking after migrations and joined Cracken technologies to help support clients moving on to the Cracken platform and get them set up with not only a traditional opt for swear working but the tech platform that enables that way of working. Ruby you said that you joined the company four years ago, I think I'm right in saying you only graduated four years ago and here you are looking after partners worth hundreds of millions of pounds to the business. I mean what does that say about octopus energy's culture and the trust the leadership has in the team? Yeah, so I graduated four years ago, I think I had eight weeks without work and unfortunately ran out of money pretty quick but luckily came across octopus which at the time was I think 25 people in a box room in Hammersmith and I remember on my first week we were already doing our kind of Friday night dinners in a very different way but Greg was speaking about how we're going to hit one million customers in five years and I was thinking give this gracious like we'll see but you know it's happened and beyond so I think that's pretty fantastic and when you're kind of living in the four four years it seems quite normal and natural everything's been quite organic but definitely when you look back in hindsight it's really nuts the opportunities that I've been allowed to have I guess you know there's definitely a aspect of being listened to I can think back when I am cheekly asked for a month off before I'd even been here six months and John said yes and when I left I've been doing a lot of stuff manually to do with home moves and I wrote out this page document for James and I said can we please develop all of this stuff technology and you know most people would say who is this girl who does she think she is she's just you know got no career experience but that wasn't the case and actually some of it did happen so it's really nice I think here in the culture is that if you have good ideas and I guess knowledge is power in a certain way that no matter where the idea comes from you know you're going to be able to be listened to and I think the scene management team has taken a lot of risk and I'd like to think that that's paid off with the people that is allowed to rise up I guess brilliant and that's great to hear well James let's go back to the start of this technology journey then you're setting up the business with Greg Jackson and Stuart Jackson in 2015 so talk us through the thinking behind developing your own technology platform yeah I think that there was never any question about us building our own technology it's what we're going to have done for the last 15 or 20 years is build technology platforms so it wasn't really a conscious decision it was in on the business plan from day one to say we will build our own technology if we have to rationalize it you know I would say there's three things which from the outset were the obvious reasons one is managing our customer data both for the sort of protection of the customers and not having that with multiple third parties we're responsible for it but also for the value of the business in terms of being able to structure it in a way that works for us and not in a way which a third party thinks works for them secondly is achieving efficiency even on a simple activity like recording a meter reading if a customer's telephone or emailed a meter reading through but certainly on a more complex task which Ruby mentioned one of her first pieces of work was helping design the process for managing house moods and Ruby's contribution was she was using at that stage a third party tool to do the process and you've got somebody smart who says this is insane I mean Ruby how long did it take to do a house move using a third party piece of software I think it was about three and a half minutes a single one so when you're doing hundreds at the time it does add up and so and you're using the process which you helped design and click on how long does that take now less than 30 seconds okay so you have sort of like a sevenfold increase in productivity and efficiency because we can design it around what are people need to do and their experience and then you know thirdly the reason for building our own technology has been that we can genuinely differentiate ourselves track and does all of the core activities of the business if we were using third party software we would be constrained to the ability of that software you know we could put a different brand on it charge a different price but essentially you're going to be constrained to the service you can offer by building our own technology we've been able to offer the tracker the agile type products genuinely different approaches in the industry and we've been able to do those to our design to our time scale and without needing to sort of like be beholden upon asking a third party to you know when can when can we have our ideas please and that is why should we say you know being being a technology business means we think we can genuinely bring a new approach to the industry and differentiate ourselves but also help move the industry forward. So Ruby how has crack and change since you joined the business it's changed big time really I think when I first started we were kind of utilizing two systems and James and the teams always had quite an iterative approach so how can we add things slowly based on you know what the ops team needs which is always going to be based on what the customer needs and then as we get all of those building lots together it's really kind of grown in lots of different ways and that growth and they would us to move away from the third party platform and then we had some time building crack and and focusing on how we can ever improve it and then getting to a point where we're able to do migrations and moving other customers onto the platform and then also selling the platform to other companies so yeah it's changed a lot when I think about right at the beginning some of the things that we were doing quite manually you know as a growing company anyway you always do many stuff at the beginning but I can think about being putting occupy a paper bills and in letters and putting on stamps myself and putting them in the postbox and then James and I are on a Friday night would sit and we would go through occupy a bills manually. the, you know, the tech teams always been really hands on with that kind of work, it's practice makes perfect. Do we have a system that we've been doing maybe in a work around sense that we're really happy with? And then once we have that, we'll transfer it into an automated way. And then soon something that you spend half an hour and hour doing on a Friday evening is something that you kind of forget about. And then all of a sudden we send out, don't know, 10,000 maybe occupables each month. So just something really small, tiny process that you take for granted and you soon forget about when it's automated actually has a journey in itself. Julie, can you talk us through how the relationship works between development and ops? Sure. I mean, the way the kind of crack in has evolved as I was saying before, it's very ops-led. And there are kind of various things that help kind of feed into that. In the early days, I think it was a lot easier. There were so many, there were so few of us and we all sat in one room and if something didn't work very well, you could turn around and say, why does this do that? Why is that kind of a tricky process? Can we make that better? And one day the guy who's a head of front end development these days, who's Ash, was just kind of sat working with somebody in ops, whose their desk was covered in these post-it notes. Oh, this might have been James, actually, I think about it. And the idea was like, well, let's make a reminder speech here in Crackin. And I think Ash's one was he was watching somebody go through the incredibly laborious process of trying to explain a complex bill to a customer and they had a calculator out and they had a page of notes on the screen and they were trying to make these things work together and that's like, well, we can make that better. Let's make a little tool where you just kind of click on the different bits of Crackin and it gives you the sun. And these little wins, these little kind of productivity quality of life things, they're so valuable. We kind of built an initiative around it. We call that yaduring, which is a reference to Pacific Rim. It's a kind of cult sci-fi film. But the idea is you get a better, stronger process by putting together these two people at ops team member and a developer. And it's not just the technology we get out of it as well. It builds this trust and empathy and it helps us kind of keep that going even though the teams are growing. So we still do that even, even over lockdown, we get people together on Zoom calls and it helps in the little features that come out of it. But it helps new team members get to know what ops really do as well. It keeps them kind of really connected to that process. I think that's been invaluable kind of as the business has kind of grown and changed. And it's not just about optical synergy anymore because as we're saying, we're doing more to kind of license this technology out to other platforms. So in the early days, it was how do we take the power of the Crackin tool that ops use every day? And then how do we put that in the hands of users? How do we help them self-serve these features now that we've kind of worked out exactly how they're supposed to work based on the knowledge of the ops members who know the industry like the back of their hand? How do we put that safely in the hands of a user so they can solve their own problems? And now we're doing that through API is so that we can give that to our white level clients who can then pass that power onto their users and empower them to solve their own problems. So it's really that sort of partnership between the tech between the ops is just creates this brilliant feedback loop that helps make Crackin better and better. And can you just tell us how many are in each team just so for the benefit of listeners, we know the size of the teams working on the platform? Sure. So I think I'm right in saying it's about 70 in the tech team these days. They're kind of organized into different kind of small sub teams around either like kind of parts of business or in the front end we've got more kind of multifunctional teams these days. So we've got Charmander Boba Saw and Squirtle teams looking after the account management, the onboarding process and then some dedicated Crackin front end developers as well. And that's about 10 strong these days. And how about in ops, Ruby? So Octo's ops there's 450 around about I believe in ever changing numbers. I think you know still recruiting 20 people a month, but yeah about 450. Just just almost teams for us or whilst we're mentioning it. I think one of the other benefits from Crackin which is perhaps obvious in hindsight, but yeah I wouldn't claim I anticipated it in advance. But I think both Jillian and Ruby have touched on how well the teams work together because we're doing our own thing and you know put people in the company do very much you know work as one large team rather than a sort of a tech team in one corner and an ops team in another. And I think in both sides I think we've got should we say retention rates to be very proud of. But certainly for the ops I felt that there's a lot of companies who set out and say we're going to you know we're going to hire great people and we're going to really look after our customers and they're going to be smart and and sits like and we've really done that. And I think one of the ways of keeping good people is you don't then fill up their day with tedious tasks. So if you go back to that example of something sort of taking three and a half minutes or less than 30 seconds it's kind of like if you give people tools which and partly they've got ownership of and they can influence but partly just make it sort of they don't spend so much of a time following a complicated series of dull buttons and they can spend more of their time concentrating on adding value to the customer and having a more worthwhile drop. That's been an education and I think a factor of Kraken is contributing to that culture. Can I pick up on that actually because I wanted to say that I think a huge part of that is the trust that you get as a member of the team. The company culture has always been it's been incredibly supportive of learning by failing for one thing which a lot of companies say they do well and perhaps you know when it actually comes to it not so much but you you really do get trusted to run with something in the company and I remember a meeting as a tech talk we do these kind of tech talks once a week the head of engineering whose David Winterbottom had sort of said to me over a lunchtime once have you if you heard of this kind of GraphQL technology this kind of new API technology and I was like I've heard of it I've not really played it like you should you should you should go and have a look at that it's interesting and I went away and I had to play with it and then I gave this kind of book to the team because I thought it was quite cool and I thought maybe it'd make a nice like internal tool for Kraken to help people find data that they're interested in and James was in the meeting and I remember you kind of looked up at the end and I was like oh yeah that looks really good. We'll have one of those in production plays for the consumer site and we'll use that for the white labeling process in the APIs and I was like cool that sounds great that sounds really cool and and now it does power all of these white labels and there are so many places you could work that would either have said it's too cussing edge we can't put that in production or that's an interesting thought but it's not kind of our top priority or you're a front and developer maybe you shouldn't be building our APIs you know any any of those things would have been a completely reasonable point to make but it's not how we work it's it's not how we treat our people and a lot of what we get out of Kraken comes from that trust that we put in people and I think with that trust as well we get a lot of the agility that's allowed us to grow so quickly in the last four years and do things like migrations and in timelines that no one thought was possible I think back to what we did in January we had kind of a tech lead obsolete and a project lead who was in most of the conversations and we were empowered and enabled to make decisions on the spot on a on a phone call and maybe if we're in nervous we'd check back in and make sure that James is happy or our character was thought it was also a good decision but it's really empowering to be able to make decisions on the spot without having to get it okayed or signed off or go through the layers and then come back down again and that means that we were able to you know migrate 100,000 customers onto the platform in about two and a half months and you know pretty smoothly to be honest I was pretty happy with it okay so James earlier on you gave us a quick overview of things but talk us through exactly how Kraken works and what it does yeah I mentioned Kraken is essentially the it's the platform at the heart of the business so anything to do with looking after customers so the core part of the business is something that should be in Kraken and so essentially you know for customers we supply energy so and we've got a responsibility for looking after and managing the supply and metering of the energy to their to their property so Kraken does that into acts with the industry and it manages those processes secondly we need to support customers and generally that means talking to them so Kraken handles the communication with customers and the areas which you might call generally called CRM and thirdly we business customers need to pay for their energy so Kraken manages the sort of the billing and the payment collection and and accounting for customers so that sort of financial element so as it's hard it's everything we do for our customers and James how I mean we've heard how many people are kind of working on the on the sort of technology and the project how often is it being updated you know how many what version are you on now for example I mean version number would be And, Julie, can you quickly look up and let the latest pull? reverse number. We run a process called CI/CD, continuous integration, continuous deployment. And what that means is we are rebuilding the application and, indeed, the infrastructure, the application is sitting on continuously. And that, you know, by example, I sort of say, that's now currently about 50 times a day that we do a new version and a new build of the infrastructure and the software running. So every incremental step is really small, and it's very well tested and it's very safe because the impact of a small change is going to be small and we've got strategies we can either fix forward or occasionally rollback if we had to. I think we've had to rollback about three times in five years. That's very rare that we take that decision. But overall, it's a little bit like a glacier. You might not see it changing minute to minute, but actually, bases can move quite quickly. And you come back a month later and you say, well, that's changed a lot. And for the ops users, there's a constant drip of changes or improvements, which we announce internally through Slack or through cracking itself. And so, you know, rather than, you know, ops users are saying, there's a new version coming. You've got to come and learn these hundred new features. There's actually just a feed. You know, it's like, and we're going to say, it's exactly one a day, new feature. It'll tell us, you know, sometimes there'll be three or four things and then maybe a couple of days without an announcement. But it will be just little changes, like, you know, that pain problem you had, you knew reported, you can now do that. There's now a new button to do that or whatever. I was going to say I was I was already looking up the number of closed fios and I make it about 18 and a half thousand. So you could look at it as that many versions of cracking. Well, James, one of the things you said earlier about the reasons why you developed crack and was for differentiation. So I guess that leads to the question, why license the technology to your competitors? I think you go back to the aim of the company. We want to make what we took. We call internally a green dent in the universe. We are very committed to trying to address climate change. We think that the solutions for climate change are going to need to be assisted by technology. And the industry as a whole has a lot of areas where the technology systems are not sufficiently flexible or scalable for making the rate of change necessary. So, in part, the objective is to introduce technology and new approaches to the industry. And for that green dent to be meaningful, it's got to have sufficient scale. Well, you know, if you looked at it, if an objective was to create an energy supply in the UK, being a one half million plus customers is successful. But on a global scale, that's not going to be really influencing change. We've said publicly, we want to have 100 million customers on the platform by the end of the decade, ideally sooner. To do that, we're going to need to have a much greater scale and be international. Having genuinely our own technology means that licensing for technology to other parties who really have some of the scale means that we can accelerate that growth and we can achieve that growth faster. And when the objective is to be trying to put in place technology that the industry can change or dampen you ways of working as soon as possible for climate change, the sooner the better. So, it's really to surface and advance that growth faster. Ruby, can you share with us how many companies are actually using Kraken now? Yeah, so we can look at it in two parts. So, we have Eon, Empower, Good Energy in the UK using Kraken, or about to use Kraken in the midst of moving over. And then in Australia, we have Hanwara and Origin as well. And then the second half, I guess, is companies that are powered by octopus energy. So we have partners or white neighbors, I guess, called M&Eth energy, co-op, London Power, and then Tesla Power as well as our major recent one. So, we've also got customers using our APIs to build Great Tech. And this goes all the way back to when we first developed these innovative tariffs when we had a hackday and just invited a bunch of people to come together and see what they could make out of the APIs that we've developed for these tariffs. Because we've got a lot of APIs at this point that support different use cases. But that's only grown into more exciting things. And we've now got an app, which is the Octopus Watch app, which has been developed completely, independently by Kim Boutas, who's a civil engineer. And he joined Octopus Energy just as a customer to receive the great service that we're really proud of. But he found that there's actually a lot more to our ecosystem. And that's really exciting, because it means that the technology that we've built, that we can think of kind of great ways to use and ways to make people's lives better, we can really put in the hands of our customers. And they can build great things as well. And they'll come up with stuff that we've never thought of. And that's a really good point, actually, because it goes to the heart of what I was saying, though, that's the examples. But when we sort of say we think technology can help drive the fight against climate change, it's very specifically the fact that we've got agile pricing to encourage people to dynamically move their consumption, sounds are very frightening and complicated concept. But then when you get third parties building an ecosystem using the APIs to automate that process, it actually becomes transparent to the customers. And you get customers who are very much more highly engaged and understanding of some of the challenges and the issues about where our energy comes from and the constraints in distributing it. So that is genuinely, those APIs that Julie works on are enabling that transition to a more sustainable future. And James, when someone joins the company, where does crack and sit in terms of the priorities in terms of introducing to them? It's funny. We're still at a size where I meet every candidate for the technology team. Yeah, in that first discussion with them, I'm at pains to make sure that they understand the values of the company. And I've been putting those values really as twofold, which are looking after the customers and the fight against climate change. Those two, to my mind, are the extent of our focus. I actually listened to one of Ruby's colleagues talking about the sort of culture and the onboarding process to Origin and Australia recently. And Lily said, there's three values which we have. And I thought, well, there's a bit of a difference. And she said, you know, one, looking after customers. Two, the fight against climate change. I thought, so far, so good. So what's your third? And she said, three, great technology. And I thought, that's really interesting because actually the ops team, when they're onboarding people have been sent to the new recruits, you know, the great technology is part of the culture of the company. And it's somehow, I, as CTO, it's one of the things which I've been failing to sort of say is actually one of our values to our technical recruits. I kind of guess, you know, I take it as granted that, you know, that they know, they've seen what we've published in the technical space and they know some of the individuals and that's why they're in the room. But I was really sort of like heartening and warming that that was actually the expanded values from the ops team. And how do you see so that changing as kind of you get bigger and bigger? Because that's exactly what's happening. I hope it doesn't change. There's values should be consistent. And, you know, we should fight very, very hard to make sure that the, you know, the culture and the sort of trusting people and treating them like adults when they come through the door is something that even, you know, even as we get bigger, we make sure that we manage the company in such a way that we retain that. And can I just add about kind of from an ops perspective, when we onboard the ops team, you know, Kraken's the first thing we introduce people to. And I guess it is the second thing after thinking about our attitude towards customers, the reason that we're here and what our role is of the operation. Kraken's the key enabler for that. And I think when I was working within octopus ops, people kind of come in, they're aware and they're like, yeah, cool, set up. It's, yeah, it's fun. And what's been really magic about working in the migrations and working with other clients is actually being able to, so when you're doing training or just explaining how Kraken works is being able to see the reaction from people who, know, where octopus isn't the norm and Kraken isn't the norm. And they're just really in awe of the things that you can do on Kraken. It's almost like this freedom from all of the repetitive and non-winded and just kind of pulling your hair out like, why do we need permissions to do this? And then why can't I service my customers in the way that I want to? Actually, as soon as they see how Kraken works, it's so much excitement there that all of the red tape they've had before has kind of disappeared. So that's been really, really lovely to see working with other clients. And it's a bit of a reality check. When you're in the day to day, you often forget just how great what we're creating it. It's quite amazing to see, and I genuinely mean this, Ruby and Jillia, as you're talking about your experiences, how much you're smiling, it's clearly, you know, a great thing to be working on. All right, I'm not just saying that. genuinely coming across, which is great. I want to finish off just looking at the future plans, and it'll be just good to know what you're all working on next with Kraken. Ruby, let's come back to you on this one first. So I really, I think the next two years, my biggest focus is helping Empower and Eon move on to the platform and build their company, Eon Nex, to hopefully be one of the leading energy companies in the UK powered by Kraken, I guess, as the centre of enabling that. I think from a Kraken technology's point of view, we've got quite interesting and potentially challenging periods coming up where we're almost formalising our processes a little bit more, which is probably a swear word actually out, so maybe I'll undo that. But really, I'd never want to say no to an opportunity, and sometimes I think, Greg and the senior management team are a bit mad. Well, what are we doing this? Why are we doing this? It's working so far, and we dive into things and kind of all hands on debt, let's make this work. I think as we start to repeat and bring more clients on board and see them move towards out of a migration phase and into kind of a BAU, looking after them long term, as their business grows, it's going to be a new challenging period for us, something we haven't done before. In migration, we've done nine of them now, it feels like it's pretty normal to do, so I'm quite excited for that. And Julie, how about yourself? Definitely one of the amazing things about working outfaces, you never know what next week's going to hold. You never know what like new project's going to get announced, and then suddenly it's like, oh wow, okay, cool, we're enabling this this week wicked. I've got long term aims to kind of continue that process of taking features from Kraken into APIs and giving them out to customers, and that will be an ongoing process for a while, but that is something that has to sit alongside making room for the kind of innovations that are going to come out of like whatever mad schemes that are going on that James could probably tell us a bit about actually. Well, that's a nice cue over to James in. One of the analysis we used with the team earlier in the year was to think about the company's growth and achieving its mission as a space rocket. We've been going just about five years, four and a half years in the market, and we sort of set that in the context of saying, you know, that is the stage one of the rocket. It's kind of like the first 90 seconds, you know, there's been an awful lot, we've done, it's been great fun, it's been challenging, but we haven't yet changed the world, and that is the mission. You know, we've got additional backers, we've got a great team, and I think, you know, now we look at what is the second stage of this rocket? Because we've achieved more than I think, you know, it really touched on it earlier when we've joined the vision was that we have a million customers in five years. Well, we've shattered that target, but you know, the targets we set ourselves are genuinely big, and it's now that second stage, how can we surprise ourselves with what we can achieve? You know, still look after the customer, but also now start to do much more to look after the planet too. Are there other areas or industries that you're looking at taking crack and into? I wouldn't say we are looking at other industries, directly. I think other parts of the industry, I think one of our challenges is, we need to be enabling people to be able to understand the source of their power, or if not, knowledge would be understand it, to be consuming power at the point where it's cleanest to produce. And therefore, you know, by whatever mechanisms necessary, we should be more directly linking the generation of clean energy with the consumption. The biggest domestic areas of consumption are transport and heating. Those need to be electrified as part of de-carbonising society. From where we are now, we may be looking at technologies and approaches to help control of that, and also to be looking upstream in the supply chain through to sort of matching the generation of energy with the consumption of it. I was just going to say, and looking further ahead, James, I mean, what do you want Kraken's legacy to be, let's say? For me personally, my, I didn't come from an energy background to things that I heard about back in 2015, which, through which we say was a big sort of influence for me personally on my journey, was described as the energy trilema. And the energy trilema is how can we achieve a source of energy that is sustainable, reliable, and affordable. When you see that challenge thrown down, you realise that if we can solve that or make a contribution to solving it, it is not only going to be great for the planet in, sort of, environmentally ecologically, it's also going to have much wider geopolitical benefits for the population of the planet. And so, I think the legacy I would like us to have from my effort and from Kraken as well is like, you know, it's made a, you know, the best possible legacy is that it made a contribution to solving that trilema. And certainly, you know, whether we succeed or fail, you know, we've had it done good try and try it. That's a really lovely way to finish and good luck with all those future plans. But for now, Julie, Ruby and James, thanks so much for talking to Inside Octopus Energy. As always, if you've got any comments on anything our free guests have discussed today, please do get in touch via the website at octopus.energy or via the usual social channels. But for now, for Muscle Goldsmith and for me, Trudy Lewis, thanks for listening and goodbye.