Thoughts
I write on the why, what and how of Product Management, with a particular passion for climate-positive practices as a champion of the "Voice of the Planet", our ultimate customer.
Product Managers can fight climate change
We are running out of time to reverse our destruction of the planet — our home. The evidence is overwhelming. Given the size of the issue, every job is now a climate job, to quote Jamie Alexander of Project Drawdown. At the same time, every company is a software company, to paraphrase Satya Nadella.
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You don’t have to work on a climate tech product to make a difference.
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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.
What does Product Management look like?
We get a lot of help in understanding WHY product management is important: products need a function that synthesizes the (at times, conflicting) signals from business, design/UX and technology to mitigate the considerable risk of deciding where to deploy effort and costly resources...
How about WHAT product management looks like?
This is an attempt at an all-encompassing graphic with rich and wonderful feedback from the Product community, gratefully received. An overview of what regular effort at many product teams look like. It skews towards smaller teams in startups and scale-ups, rather than post-IPO juggernauts. It also assumes Objectives and Key Results are being used for business objective and metric setting, but you can swap in any other framework for that.
The Sustainability Square
The Sustainability Square is an alternative to the "Iron Triangle" of cost, quality and speed. The Square includes a fourth vector: carbon efficiency. This makes the climate cost of your prioritization and trade off decisions explicit, rather than relying on cost considerations as a proxy.
The Impact vs Complexity quadrant (or "two by two") breaks ideas down into:
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Quick wins that are high in value and low in cost (upper-left).
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Big bets that are high in value and cost (upper-right).
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Nice to have features that are low in cost and effort (lower-left).
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Time sinks that are low in value and high in cost (lower-right).
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We can make the climate impact explicit by adding an additional plane for carbon efficiency. Each white dot on the graph represents impact/effort in the traditional way. A corresponding green dot represents carbon efficiency. Prioritization decisions would consider the spread between white and green dots. If the green dot is lagging in the lower hemisphere, it will undermine the initial attraction of that option.
Two by Two (by Two)
The Sustainability Square is an alternative to the "Iron Triangle" of cost, quality and speed. The Square includes a fourth vector: carbon efficiency. This makes the climate cost of your prioritization and trade off decisions explicit, rather than relying on cost considerations as a proxy.