Abdel Oueryemchi
Product Builder · 20 Years Experience
Sensor Networks · Case Study
Geyser Connect & Sensor Connect App
Save energy and reduce costs.
Abdel Oueryemchi
Product Builder · 20 Years Experience
Sensor Networks · Case Study
Save energy and reduce costs.
The problem
Electric geysers burn 40–50% of household electricity, unmonitored — and a burst geyser is a major insurance liability.
What I built
A smart IoT retrofit device + companion app, taken from zero to a national B2B2C product.
The result
5,000 → 8,500+ paying customers, retention 80% → 84%, churn 20% → 16% in a year.
Electric geysers are one of the largest single loads in a South African home — 40 to 50% of the average monthly electricity bill. They run unmonitored and unoptimised, contributing to the load-shedding pressure on the national grid. On top of that, a leaking or burst geyser causes real property damage and is a significant cost driver for household insurers.
There was no existing way to retrofit a geyser with intelligence — to control it remotely, optimise its power use, or catch a leak before it became a claim. And the company had no existing product strategy or roadmap in place to build one.
I joined as Sensor Networks' first Product Manager to build that category from scratch.
With no prior product function at the company, I started by learning the business goals and customer problems directly, then set the initial strategy: prioritise the work with the highest impact first, rather than trying to do everything at once.
I built the Product Roadmap and OKRs, and mapped the full B2B2C customer journey end-to-end — awareness, controller installation, app onboarding, device linking, subscription, and termination — breaking each step into every realistic scenario, positive and negative, so both customers and support agents always knew where they stood.
I drove the hardware and software in parallel: the Geyser Connect controller and Smart Valve on one side, the Sensor Connect app on the other. Key features I scoped and shipped: WiFi connectivity, a "Heat Now" on-demand heating trigger (the most-used button in the app), Load-Shedding Heating — a predictive feature built on a third-party API (EskomSePush) that pre-heats water ahead of a scheduled outage — and Homes & Rooms, letting customers with multiple devices organise and manage them properly. I also designed the physical packaging, installation manual, and user pamphlet for the retrofit itself.
Every feature went through prototyping and real user testing before release — the Load-Shedding Heating flow alone had 5 user tests plus internal testing before shipping. I coordinated release timing with the Support team, running training sessions ahead of each rollout so agents could actually help customers with what had just shipped.
I instrumented every step of the app with Google Analytics events, which let me see what was working (and what wasn't) within days of each release, and kept a running backlog of enhancements driven directly by customer support feedback and usage data.
8,500+
Paying customers, up from ~5,000 in roughly a year
84%
Customer retention rate, up from 80%
16%
Churn, down from 20%
The product moved from concept to a live device shipping through B2B2C insurance channels nationally.
Tell me what's broken, slow, or manual — I'll tell you honestly whether it's worth building a fix, and what that would look like.