How leadership and discovery enable climate-positive product work (#3 of 4)
Product management frameworks tend to champion the voice of the customer in harmony with strategy, vision and business outcomes. These lenses govern decisions across discovery and delivery lifecycles. If we don’t apply these lenses well, we build things people don’t use.
How can we introduce climate considerations to this busy mix?
It starts with leadership.
In this article, I explore the impact on product teams empowered by key climate-positive stakeholders. I also explain why it is so important to focus on continuous discovery to avoid “product bloat”. My thanks to the ProductBC community, especially Johnny Huang, Alan Albert and Jacob Model, for their thoughtful input.
This is the third article in a series on climate-positive product management in software products. As we discussed in the first article, you don’t have to work on a climate tech product to make a difference. Whether you are building internal solutions, dashboards for hardware, or SaaS products — this one is for you. It’s a win:win for your business and the planet because climate-positive development often translates to a better bottom line.
Product teams need a green light to internalize sustainability criteria
The prevailing criteria for most product decisions are value-based and economic. Right from small feature improvements to big bets on the roadmap. Most product teams have a lot of freedom in determining initiatives. That freedom exists within constraints. Product teams have to work towards explicit strategic objectives and outcomes. It is hard for them to make trade-offs that don’t ladder up into those objectives, outcomes and values. Even harder if there is no stakeholder representing a particular outcome.
Product teams should be able to point to a stakeholder champion for climate considerations. For example, a Chief Ethics Officer, Chief Sustainability Officer or a supportive CEO/CAO/COO.
If product teams pursue climate-positive outcomes that are not sanctioned by their objectives, they are taking a risk. They could be penalised for increasing cost by not pursuing pure economic criteria. Those teams can only make climate positive decisions that don’t impact cost, speed and quality. For example, procurement decisions. That leaves the responsibility and potential of product managers untapped.
So, product leaders have a responsibility to empower teams with climate-positive objectives. This opens the door to championing the voice of the planet alongside value-based and economic forces. For example, imagine a team that has a strategic objective to build the most carbon efficient [insert software product] on the market. They won’t need to justify many of their climate-positive decisions.
Why should leaders consider this? Every job is a climate job, and there is a responsibility to do your part. Also, it makes good business sense:
- Legal and voluntary obligations towards scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions will only get more onerous. Standards are coming for software.
- Customer desire for sustainable products, prevalent in B2B and B2C use cases. Increasing alignment between the voice of the customer and voice of the planet.
- Reduced energy and other costs through climate-positive best practices.
Double down on discovery to build value and avoid product bloat
Product management boils down to continuous discovery and thoughtful delivery. Product managers are responsible for addressing five risks, according to Marty Cagan. Products should be:
- Valuable: something that our customers will choose to use.
- Usable: easy to figure out how to use.
- Feasible: buildable using current technology and skillsets.
- Viable: workable for our stakeholders within our budget, legal, and reputational constraints.
- Ethical: should we build it all? (More on this in the next article of this series.)
In the words of Kris Gale, the value is in what gets used, not what gets built. Unfortunately, there are a lot of low-value products and features out there that aren’t getting used.
According to Pendo in 2019, 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used, based on aggregated anonymized product usage data. Public cloud software companies invested up to $29.5 billion developing these features.
Those figures are staggering. Every one of those under-utilised, low value features is consuming energy. In the load they place on data centers, networks and local memory. But also in the wasted energy it took to design, code, compile, test and promote those features. We can think of each feature as a form of “embodied carbon” in that sense. Just like a burnt-out laptop constitutes e-waste, so too does a feature that nobody uses. This issue of product bloat has some crossover with software bloat or bloatware. We can consider it a category of e-waste.
Clearly, we need to do better at addressing the first and most important risk of value. Create value and people will likely use your product if you get the rest right. If we fail on value, we also fail on the fifth risk, ethics, and contribute to product bloat.
Teresa Torres offers some great techniques for diving deeper on discovery of value. She argues that discovery should be continuous — not just something we do at the start of a product development cycle. We need a continuous mindset to discover, validate and deliver value on a rolling basis.
This doesn’t mean we need to sit still and wait for indisputable quantitative validation. We can still move forward and test for value in interviews, low-fi mock ups, rapid prototypes and experiments. By the time anything makes its way into production, it should have had its value well-and-truly “discovered”. Anything that doesn’t make the threshold should be cut. If not, product managers are directly contributing the energy consumption of product bloat.
In the next article of this series, we’ll get into some practical, tactical frameworks for discovering value and applying the ethical lens continuously.
Next up in this series: Product frameworks that optimise for climate-positive outcomes
