Ecosystem Marketplace - Market Intelligence System

The Role

As Head of Product Innovation at Ecosystem Marketplace (Feb 2022 - Apr 2023), I led end-to-end delivery of a groundbreaking market intelligence platform for the voluntary carbon market. This was my first executive product leadership role, managing stakeholder expectations, vendor relationships, and cross-functional delivery.

The Problem

The voluntary carbon market operates over-the-counter (OTC) with minimal price transparency. Buyers and sellers negotiate privately, making it difficult for market participants to understand fair pricing, track trends, or benchmark deals. Ecosystem Marketplace had decades of research expertise but needed a scalable, real-time product to serve institutional customers.

What I Built

A B2B real-time market intelligence platform with three core capabilities:

Real-Time Price Tracking

• Aggregated pricing data from registry transactions, broker listings, and voluntary disclosures
• Standardized heterogeneous data sources into unified price benchmarks by project type, vintage, and geography
• Created automated data pipelines replacing manual research processes

Market Analysis & Reporting

• Interactive dashboards for price trends, supply/demand dynamics, and market sentiment
• Automated report generation that previously required two full-time analysts
• Custom segmentation by methodology, co-benefits, and certification standards

Transparency & Integrity Focus

• Embedded data provenance tracking—every price point linked to source documentation
• Built-in quality scoring to flag potentially unreliable data
• Open methodology documentation so users understood data limitations

Impact

• 90% reduction in reporting time - Automated what previously took analysts weeks
• Saved two FTEs - Freed up research capacity for higher-value analysis
• Established scalable foundation - Platform architecture enabled rapid development of future products
• Market credibility - Ecosystem Marketplace’s 20+ year reputation for integrity extended into product space

Tech Stack

• Data Ingestion: Custom scrapers + API integrations with carbon registries (Verra, Gold Standard, ACR)
• Storage: PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB for time-series price data
• Orchestration: Apache Airflow for ETL pipelines and scheduled data updates
• Frontend: React + TypeScript dashboard with Recharts for data visualization
• Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, RDS, S3) with automated deployments

Lessons Learned

Transparency Builds Trust in Market Data Products When competing B2B data platforms kept methodologies opaque (to protect IP), we published ours openly. Counterintuitively, this attracted institutional clients who valued auditability over competitive advantage. Lesson: in high-stakes markets, transparency is differentiation.

Embedded Expertise Beats Pure Tech Early versions prioritized slick dashboards. User research revealed carbon market participants wanted context more than polish—understanding why a price moved mattered more than real-time updates. We integrated analyst commentary directly into the platform, turning data into intelligence. Lesson: domain expertise is the product, not the interface.

Automation Creates Space for Value Automating routine price aggregation didn’t eliminate analyst jobs—it freed them to focus on qualitative research (e.g., regulatory impact analysis, market manipulation detection). The platform became a force multiplier for expertise rather than a replacement. Lesson: good automation shifts humans toward higher-leverage work.

Data Quality > Data Quantity We initially aimed to track every transaction across 20+ platforms. This produced massive datasets with inconsistent quality that eroded user trust. Narrowing focus to 5 authoritative sources with rigorous validation yielded better insights. Lesson: for B2B intelligence products, reliability beats comprehensiveness.