Home charger activation: days to hours
ChargePoint, 2022–2025
Automatic retries removed about 60% of activation failures, and a governed query runner cut reactivation after data issues from several days to hours.
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- Problem
- Failed home charger activations gave new customers a poor first experience with the company: some waited several days for an activated charger. Two causes dominated. An intermittently unavailable third-party activation API failed silently, and escalations took 1–2 days to reach a developer. Failures caused by incorrect data also needed a database fix, which, under security policy, only the infrastructure team could run, adding another 1–2 days.
- My role
- Designed and implemented a Kafka event-driven workflow that made activation asynchronous, so calls to the third-party API are retried automatically. Added Prometheus metrics, a Grafana dashboard and alerts so the team could act on remaining failures proactively, plus Spring Boot Actuator health and end-to-end request tracing. Built a custom SQL query runner with access limited to the activation-management tables: a developer writes the fix, a manager approves it, and it runs without the infrastructure team, keeping data governance in place.
- Result
- Async retries reduced activation failures by about 60%. For the rest, the Driver Experience team acts on alerts, prepares and executes approved fixes, and re-activates the charger, cutting reactivation after data issues from several days to hours.