Johanne Smestad joins as Chief Customer Success Officer
Johanne will own and scale UtilityCloud's entire post-sales organisation — Customer Success Management, Customer Support, and Customer Delivery (implementation and onboarding).
She joins from enterprise software company Inspera, where she spent eight years in leadership roles across implementation, onboarding, service delivery, and support, including leading a team of 16 support agents across three locations. During that time Inspera grew from around 30 mNOK to more than 200 mNOK in revenue — the same journey UtilityCloud is on now.
"Energy retailers don't buy a system, they buy the outcome it delivers. My focus is building a post-sales organisation that gets customers to that outcome faster, and keeps delivering it as they grow," said Johanne.
Sigurd Seteklev joins as Chief Product Officer
Sigurd will lead UtilityCloud's product management organisation end-to-end — strategy, discovery, UX and design, and release management — and joins the leadership team.
He founded and led Kitemaker, a YC-backed (W21) B2B SaaS product development platform, from idea through funding, launch, and customer adoption to its acquisition by ClickUp in 2024, staying on through the transition to work on product for ClickUp's project and task management suite. Before that he was Product Manager at Telenor, Chief Strategy Officer at eSmart Systems, and Director of Product at Schibsted, where he led the analytics, data, and AI teams for one of Europe's largest media and technology companies. His work spans consumer apps with millions of users to one of the world's first ML-powered smart grids. Sigurd started out as a coder, making him one of the rare people who have coded, led product, shaped strategy, and built and sold their own company.
"UtilityCloud is in a unique position: a market running on legacy systems, and a modern platform that can replace them. I'm looking forward to building the product our customers need to meet the future — and making sure it never becomes legacy itself," said Sigurd
Building for the next phase
"Johanne and Sigurd have both done this before. Bringing that experience into product and customer success at the same time is what lets us scale without losing what customers value about working with us," said Pål Njølstad, CEO of UtilityCloud.
UtilityCloud's platform helps energy retailers across the Nordics build more scalable, efficient, and competitive businesses — with customers growing 15x faster than the market average.
Read more:
- How Skandia Greenpower grew 3x while reducing operational costs by 70%
- UtilityCloud customers experience 15x faster growth and 35% reduction in churn compared to market average
Get in touch: hello@utilitycloud.no