Actrol Virtual Engineer: pivoting from retail vision to internal impact
Reece · Senior Product Designer / Product Manager
Situation
Actrol is a Reece Group business unit serving the small-to-medium commercial refrigeration market across Australia and New Zealand — the trade behind keeping everything from a small fridge to a walk-in cool room running for pubs, hotels, grocery stores, and farms. Actrol was acquired by Reece in 2016, and as part of Reece's broader 2030 digital transformation, its systems needed integrating — including replacing fragmented, partly paper-based processes with something faster and more reliable.
The specific target: 24 Refrigeration Sales Engineers whose daily workflow spanned gathering customer requirements, calculating cool room or freezer room heat load, looking up and selecting the right product, and generating a quote — all without losing accuracy on heat load, equipment recommendation, or pricing. All of this ran across disconnected systems and processes, directly limiting how effectively the business could respond to customer enquiries.
Complication
An internal group had already run the initial project evaluation and discovery, identifying long-term business value and standing up a small team of three — an Engineer, a Product Manager, and a UX Designer — to get the project moving. I joined after kickoff, inheriting a journey map, some in-person research insights, and early wireframes — all built around a retail experience aimed at the end customer, not the internal sales engineers.
After evaluating what I'd inherited, I pushed for further interviews — this time with the 24 Sales Engineers themselves and the project stakeholders — to properly align on vision. What that surfaced was real misalignment: the initial value determination the project had been built on wasn't practical.
Question
Do we continue building the retail-facing product the team had already started, or pivot to a fundamentally different user and problem — and how do we make that case credibly this late into the project?
Answer
I worked directly with the Product Manager and Engineer to make the complexity and effort of the original retail-facing undertaking visible, and made the case to pivot the entire product focus onto the 24 internal Sales Engineers rather than end customers. This was a significant scope change this deep into a live project, and it required getting engineering, product, and stakeholders aligned on why the original premise didn't hold up.
The resulting Actrol Virtual Engineer tool was rebuilt around the internal engineers' actual workflow — heat load calculation, product selection, and quote generation — shipping as a live, in-use tool (now live at ave.actrol.com.au).
Outcome
Per the broader impact captured on my resume, the shipped tool saved an estimated 20 minutes per quotation per customer for the Sales Engineers using it — directly addressing the turnaround-time problem the original brief had set out to solve, just via a different user and a more accurate read of where the value actually was.
Note: the primary documentation for this case study exists as a slide deck (26 slides) rather than written narrative — the deck covers the research, wireframes, and design detail behind the pivot in more depth than the surrounding text does. These slides should be extracted and added as images alongside this page. Additional visual reference: Dribbble shot.