Carbon removal · Ledger systems

Carbon Ledger for Climate Tech

Designing a high-integrity digital ledger for a carbon-removal process that begins with waste biomass and ends deep underground.

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Key results

140K

tonnes covered by announced removal agreements

$100MSeries B raised before the engagement

1 yearproduct design and delivery engagement

4people in the core project team

2024–2025Retool platform

Project colophon

Charm Industrial

Role: Proxy Product Owner / Product Designer
Engagement: 1 year
Scope: UX/UI · Workshops · Project Management
Tools: Retool · FigJam · Jira

Areas of impact

A carbon-removal credit is only as credible as the evidence behind it. Charm Industrial converts waste biomass into bio-oil and stores it underground, turning a physical industrial process into durable carbon removal. For buyers and investors, the difficult question is not simply whether the work happened. It is whether every step can be traced, understood, and verified.

Charm had already demonstrated substantial market confidence, including a $100 million Series B and large forward-purchase agreements. The product challenge was to give its sequestration data the same level of integrity as the industrial operation itself.

I joined as Proxy Product Owner and Product Designer to shape the Carbon Ledger from concept through implementation. My work sat between industrial telemetry, product strategy, interface design, and delivery coordination.

The interface did not merely display carbon-removal data. It had to make a chain of evidence legible and trustworthy.

01/04Understanding the system+

Understanding the system

Turning an industrial process into a product model

The source material was not a tidy set of application requirements. It was a chain of physical events: biomass sourcing, conversion into bio-oil, transport, injection, measurement, and long-term reporting. The ledger had to represent that chain without flattening away the information that made it auditable.

Designing for traceability

I worked with stakeholders to understand how operational data moved through the business and which relationships mattered for monitoring, reporting, and verification. From there, I shaped the information architecture around the evidence users needed to follow, from source material to a completed sequestration event.

The structure had to support very different reading modes. Operational users needed to find irregularities and incomplete records quickly, while business stakeholders needed a clear, defensible account of what had been removed and where the evidence came from.

Charm Industrial's public site reporting total tonnes of carbon dioxide removed to date — **From biomass to a verifiable record**The public number at one end, the issuance record at the other. Everything designed in between exists to make the second one defensible.

Issuance confirmation for 246.73 carbon credits, the verifiable output at the end of the ledger — **From biomass to a verifiable record**The public number at one end, the issuance record at the other. Everything designed in between exists to make the second one defensible.

Product design

Building the ledger, not a reporting façade

Accuracy, transparency, and traceability were product requirements rather than abstract values. A polished dashboard would be meaningless if the underlying rules did not reflect the operation precisely.

A Retool product with real logic

I designed the interface in Retool and used its low-code architecture together with custom JavaScript rules to define interactions and validation logic. This let the product move quickly without treating the interface as a disposable prototype.

I designed how records were grouped, how status and exceptions appeared, and how users moved from high-level monitoring into the detail needed for verification. The engineering team owned the data infrastructure and integrations; I made sure the product represented that data precisely and consistently.

Carbon Ledger emissions-entry screen, capturing site power, pyrolizer, fuel and biomass data in one pass — **The Carbon Ledger interface**Site emissions data captured once, at the point it is measured. The ledger is only ever as trustworthy as this screen.

Leadership and delivery

Keeping product decisions connected to the operation

Working as both designer and Proxy Product Owner meant that interface decisions, delivery priorities, and stakeholder expectations could not be handled as separate conversations.

From concept to implementation

I introduced a lightweight PMO structure around the engagement, then owned information architecture, UX design, the product roadmap, milestone planning, priority assessment, and day-to-day coordination. Operational needs became deliverable increments with visible dependencies and decision points.

I coordinated developers, QA, and subject-matter experts around critical milestones while keeping the product focused on the integrity of the ledger rather than the volume of features. That combination of product ownership and hands-on design maintained alignment between the industrial reality, the data model, and the experience stakeholders ultimately used to understand it.

Stakeholder sign-off on a proposed direction, arriving as a one-line approval in the shared channel — **Product decisions and delivery**Approval arriving in the channel where the work happened. Short decision loops were the point of embedding in the client’s operation.

Reflection

Trust is a product feature

Climate technology asks digital products to represent events that happen far away from the screen. The interface cannot create credibility on its own, but it can either preserve or weaken the credibility of the underlying operation.

The Carbon Ledger made the removal process easier to inspect and reason about. For me, the project demonstrated how UX, product management, and data integrity can reinforce one another when they are treated as one system rather than three separate disciplines.