Sustainable Product Management with Grover: Advancing the Circular Economy

Can a sustainability mindset help you build better products? Johann Jenson, Chief Product Officer at Grover, shared his insights into creating sustainable products at our Product People community event.

Johann Jenson is currently Chief Product Officer at Grover has a background not only in Product Management and customer experience but also in sustainability due to his work as a Programme Officer at UN Environment Programme. Read to learn from his insights on why sustainability makes sense and how to embed it in your product.

Sustainability — meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

The Why

Why should you even care for creating a sustainable economy product?

1. It is a growing market with many opportunities. World Economic Forum says only 9% of the world economy is circular and still no changes are made for the rest of 91%. At the same time, more than 50% of the global institutional asset base ($60 trillion) is managed by Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) funds that work to promote the incorporation of environmental, social, and corporate governance factors (ESG) into investment decision-making.
2. It makes your business more resilient. Several recent studies show, that sustainability reduces volatility and threats to the business from external factors (e.g., oil spills, cancer class action lawsuits, COVID-19). For more details, read this report by Morgan Stanley.
3. It is economically promising. A study by Gunnar Friede, Timo Busch & Alexander Bassen looked at 2,000 empirical studies and found that investments based on ESG criteria have a positive impact on corporate financial performance.
4. You will be supported by local and global initiatives. United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment is not the only one initiative that supports sustainable companies, European Green Deal from Dec 2019 also supports sustainability and circularity and more similar activities will appear in the years to come.

The How

If you are now convinced that building a product around sustainability and circularity is a good idea, the next question is where do you start?

When it comes to sustainability, there are two types of products:

1. existing products that try to become more sustainable (e.g. hotels ask you to reuse your towels and throw the used ones on the floor)
2. products, in which sustainability is core (e.g. To Good To Go fights food waste by letting people collect a cheap “magic bag” with the unsold food from restaurants and cafes before they close that day)

Grover works with solution #2: Grover is a tech subscription service delivering circular retail and finance expertise with the aim to redefine consumption and add flexibility and circularity to the wasteful tech industry.

Johann and Grover's team are convinced that product-focused companies can better adapt to changing values around sustainability because they combine all the necessary parts:

Source: Johann Jenson

Sustainability Objectives

Sustainable Development Goals are probably the right place to start — these are like global OKRs developed by the UN.

In this sense, Grover is working towards Goal 12 — ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns. By renting consumer tech product they maximize the useful life of tech and improve durability and support the right to repair.

Importantly, they are creating a product people actually need — with new tech developments it is more and more tricky for customers to make good use of them. Devices become more and more expensive, and, at the same time, there is a huge variety to chose from, so it would be beneficial to try first and swap if you changed your mind. This leads to a situation where 1 in 3 people in Germany have 3–5 unused devices.

Source: Johann Jenson

Johann pointed out how important it is to actually create a product people want to use. Everyone says they care about sustainability, but, eventually, it has to make economic sense for people to change their behavior.

Sustainable products should both impact and reflect customer preferences.

Source: Johann Jenson

Sustainable Outcomes

To measure success you can use the help of one of these organizations:

1. Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
2. Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS)
3. Ellen Macarthur Foundation
4. Chris Tuppen at Advancing Sustainability — this is who Grover is working with

Depending on your product nature, your sustainable outcome can be in various areas:

Source: Johann Jenson

These are some metrics that are important for Grover’s sustainability outcomes:

1. E-waste savings with Grover’s reach rental model sum up to 360 metric tons to date (this is equal to 15 truckloads of consumer tech devices).
2. CO2 savings with Grover’s reach rental model sum up 4.275 metric tons to date (this is like 900 cars driving for a year).
3. Each device rented with Grover saves 5.2 devices in the traditional linear consumption model.

Sustainability Should Be Part of How You Work

Grover embeds the idea of circularity not only into the product, but also into their software architecture, their infrastructure, and the way they operate.

Grover team works with this mantra for product building and development:

Build. Think. Measure. Repeat.

Watch the full version of Johann’s talk for more insights and tips.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And join the next Product People meetup for more inspiring stories from Product Managers from around the world!

Product Management People (Berlin, Germany)