Intrapreneurship challenge: 5 projects in 1 month with Setec 💪

Setec is one of Europe's leading engineering firms. In 2022, the company launched an intrapreneurship programme: five internal teams, each with a product idea, and one month to turn it into an MVP. My role was to support all five of them, on my own, from framing to the first screens.

The topics were extremely specialised:

• a marketplace for managing the take-back of industrial waste
• a platform for smart flood monitoring and forecasting
• an industrial project management platform
• a map-making platform for urban mobility
• a LiDAR data processing platform for road infrastructure

It's a project I'm quite proud of, because it was intimidating. I was on my own, facing experts who didn't know my job or what I could bring them.

Before drawing anything, I spent a lot of time understanding everything: their vocabulary, their constraints, their expectations. I asked a huge number of questions, sometimes even challenging the business models. FigJam was a great help for laying out the ideas with each team.

To keep up the pace on five projects in parallel, I built a design system from the components shared across Setec's various entities. It served as a single source of truth and let me produce the interfaces much faster. That didn't stop me from getting very little sleep that month!

At the end of the month, each team left with:

• a clearer business model
• a precise user journey
• visuals of the main screens and actions

These deliverables supported the pitches at the end of the programme. It was a heavy workload, but an extremely rewarding one.

In 2023, I supported five new projects, once again on very technical topics:

• a tool to list the bridges in a given area, give an overall assessment of each structure, and track related information and updates
• a similar tool for larger structures, with much more data, including point clouds
• a tool to analyse the digital sobriety of the group's entities and projects
• a platform to centralise engineering projects and their lessons learned. Through tags, reviews or reported mistakes, everyone can build on others' experience and avoid repeating the same errors
• a project that mainly needed a technical cost estimate: I didn't do it alone, but I acted as project manager to coordinate it

I followed the selected projects for a few months, then left before they launched. Some have since become companies in their own right, and I know my work is still being used today. Despite the complexity of the topics, I managed to make myself understood, speak their language and meet their expectations: the mission was a real success.