Taking Visit a Heat Pump From an Idea to a National Service
The Challenge
Most people considering a heat pump have never seen one working in a home like theirs. Nesta wanted to fix that by connecting prospective buyers with owners who would show them one. When I started in November 2023 there was no product, just the idea.
My Approach
Before anything was built, I ran the service by hand. I messaged people on Nesta’s mailing list who had registered interest in a pilot, recruited the first hosts, matched them with visitors and ran the visits myself, doing each step the platform would later automate. Those first visits over the Christmas break told us exactly what hosts and visitors need to make a visit work, and that became the brief for the build, delivered with Go Free Range in Ruby on Rails.
The service launched nationwide in April 2024. After launch I spoke with homeowners, installers and visitors every week, and those conversations drove each release.
Nesta asked me back in January 2026 to help the service scale and to make its decisions data-driven. I instrumented the platform with event tracking so the team could see which parts of a host’s profile led to the two actions that matter, messaging a host and booking a visit. Complete profiles turned out to drive more bookings, so I redesigned the whole host onboarding flow around profile completion. I also analysed 500 visitor messages to find the fourteen things people most often ask (noise came top, which nobody expected) and used that to decide what host pages should show first.
Before wrapping up in August 2026 I onboarded Nesta’s new in-house product manager and gave the team advice and training on using AI to speed up analysis, from querying product data to summarising research, so they could answer their own questions with tools like Claude Code rather than wait on the data team.
Results
Nesta’s own figures, published in April 2026: over 1,200 heat pump owners registered as hosts, more than 1,500 bookings, and nearly 2,500 people connected. A 2025 survey of 154 visitors found that 55% went on to install a heat pump after their visit, and a further 18% took steps towards one.
“Nesta worked with The Product Bridge throughout 2024 to build and scale our Visit a Heat Pump service, transforming it from a proof of concept into a live, nationwide offering.” Alasdair Hiscock, Design Lead, Nesta.
Key Outcomes
- From an idea to a nationwide service in five months, by running it manually first
- Over 1,200 hosts and 1,500 bookings by April 2026
- 55% of surveyed visitors went on to install a heat pump
- Event tracking and message analysis now drive design decisions
- In-house product manager onboarded, with training on using AI to speed up data analysis
