There's a certain kind of problem that lives rent-free in your head for months. Not urgent enough to drop everything for, but annoying enough that you never quite let it go. This is the story of one of those, and how an AI skill finally gave me the right-sized solution.
A bit about where I work
I'm a Senior Product Engineer at epilot, a vertical SaaS company built for the energy industry, mostly utilities, municipal suppliers, and grid operators across the DACH region. The core of what we do is what we call an Energy XRM, a 360 platform that handles the relational side of running a utility: sales, service, products, partners, customer portals, regulatory workflows, all in one place. It's built specifically for the messy reality of the energy industry, where a single customer might be enrolling in a tariff, configuring a heat pump, and submitting paperwork to a grid operator in the same week.
One of our most-used products is called Journeys - a no-code, multi-step form that our users share with their end-customers or embed on their websites to onboard customers, qualify leads, and sell products. If you've ever signed up for an electricity tariff online in Germany, there's a decent chance you walked through an epilot Journey without knowing it. I work on the team that maintains the Journey product.
