Product frameworks that optimise for climate-positive outcomes (#4 of 4)
Empowered product managers are in a position of responsibility. To specify outcomes, determine scope and requirements, prioritise effort and spot issues. They can raise awareness of climate-related issues and come up with alternative solutions. Better ways of doing things that don’t have the negative effects on the climate and/or society and/or the organisation.
This is the fourth and final article in the climate-positive product management series for software. Previously, we discussed why product managers can make a difference to climate change, some easy climate change concepts to get started and the impact of leadership and true discovery in delivering value and avoiding waste. Here, we offer a few restated frameworks to champion the voice of the planet in every day product work.
The need for green software will continue to grow. By including software in your sustainability efforts now, your company will have a head start in this important area. Sanjay Podder et al.
The fifth risk — building ethics into product strategy
Last week, we touched on the five risks of product management (value, usability, feasibility, viability and ethics). You may have only heard of the first four — they get the most attention. The ethics risk needs more champions. Marty Cagan advocates for “explicitly considering ethical implications by adding a fifth risk”. See his book, Empowered. Teresa Torres also promotes the ethics risk in Continuous Discovery Habits.
The ethical risk is all about using the leverage of our craft responsibly. Products have the potential to influence behaviour, discriminate, amass data and manage relationships. These outcomes carry risk and responsibility. The fifth risk presents a foothold for normalising efforts towards responsible execution. I hope that we can start talking more about the fifth risk as a home for climate considerations.
Eckhart Tolle, a renowned spiritual leader, received a question from a product manager during one of his retreats. In his response, Tolle explained that technology has a “great potential for raising consciousness”. We can balance this potential with the need to make things commercially viable. Clearly, Eckhart is moonlighting as a product coach.
Those lofty considerations are all well and good. But how do we translate them into actual work and decision-making? It’s time to explore the everyday tools for practical, tactical discovery and delivery.
Decision frameworks for the voice of the planet
There are many prioritisation tools and frameworks (quadrants, RICE, Kano, etc.). These should support ethical outcomes by default, so that we can reduce the cognitive burden of the fifth risk. Unfortunately, they don’t. They mostly balance time, effort and cost without giving explicit space or weight to ethical considerations. As a result, we risk losing sight of ethical risks in the hustle and bustle of a product manager’s everyday decisions and pressures.
As these don’t exist, let’s reframe them! What might that look like?
The Sustainability Square
Let’s start with the Iron Triangle — also called the project management triangle, triple constraint and project triangle. A resource prioritisation tool as old as time. It suggests that you can only have two of the three desired outcomes: speed; quality; and low cost.
Iron Triangle:
Want a high quality product shipped yesterday? It’ll be expensive.
Want a quick, cheap feature? Don’t expect quality.
Want a high quality, low cost feature? Expect it next year.
The Iron Triangle is an effective but blunt tool. Apply it too rigidly, and you’ll miss opportunities. The secret lies in understanding that the parameters are not completely fixed. For example, you can have high quality, medium turnaround time and medium cost.
The triangle does not explicitly support climate-positive decisions. Carbon efficiency is baked into Cost. Cost acts as a partial proxy for energy consumption, and a lagging indicator of sustainable practices. For example, if you prioritise quality and fast turnaround, you may see a spike in Cost. That spike partially reflects higher energy consumption.
We need more explicit, leading indicators of carbon efficiency. Only then can we optimise for climate-positive outcomes. Given how far behind we are in the climate fight, carbon efficiency is not an optional outcome that we can flex (unlike speed, cost or quality). Something like a Sustainability Square may be more appropriate. You can have any two of quality, speed and cost, but carbon efficiency is non-negotiable.
Sustainability Square:
Impact / Effort / Sustainability Quadrants
Let’s try another one. Most product folks have a few two-by-twos or quadrants in their toolkit for prioritisation decisions. For example, the Value vs. Complexity — sometimes expressed as Impact vs Effort or Value vs Cost.
Impact vs Effort quadrant:
The quadrant breaks ideas down into:
- Quick wins that are high in value and low in cost (upper-left).
- Big bets that are high in value and cost (upper-right).
- Nice to have features that are low in cost and effort (lower-left).
- Time sinks that are low in value and high in cost (lower-right).
Empowered product teams may have carbon efficiency baked into Impact or Value assessment. This requires cognitive effort each time you use a quadrant to surface sustainability considerations. Choice architecture and default settings are so powerful in nudging behaviour. It makes sense to get more explicit. We could reframe quadrants with a third plane: carbon efficiency. It could look something like this:
Each white dot on the graph represents impact/effort in the traditional way. A corresponding green dot represents carbon efficiency. Prioritisation 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.
For example, imagine you are the PM for a product with a machine learning component. You are balancing the impact/effort of human training versus extra computing power. The carbon efficiency plane may help you weigh these approaches. It would certainly help you avoid developing red AI. Red AI is where excess computing power delivers accuracy beyond requirements. See this flower classification example.
Which discovery methods are most climate friendly?
Prioritisation and trade off decisions aren’t just for backlog reviews and solution selection. They are also relevant when pursuing discovery and designing experiments.
Teams often weigh the effort, cost and speed of an experiment with the level of fidelity it will provide in testing an assumption. Usually in the form of another two-by-two / quadrant. They don’t tend to weigh the energy efficiency of an experiment.
Effort vs Fidelity — Experiment Quadrant:
Imagine you want to test a customer-related assumption. You are deliberating between several methods — an on-site observation, a survey, a painted door test and a split test (aka. A/B test). Each of these methods has cost and fidelity profiles. They also have energy profiles. On-site observation might need transportation. A split-test might host significant infrastructure. A survey might need a hosted landing page.
The Sustainability Square could alert you to the energy profiles of experiment methods. However, we don’t currently have any guidelines in this space. These considerations are likely to slow us down. Without guidance, product pods have to flesh out profiles before they can weigh the differences. This is a call to anyone reading this for a shortlist of experiment types ranked by energy efficiency. It would be very helpful in reducing friction and championing sustainable discovery.
Procurement frameworks
Let’s end where most folks currently start. Our vendors and partners should reflect our values and priorities. They also make up our Scope 3 emissions. Take cloud services as an example. Data centres already consume an estimated 1% of electricity consumed globally. You can be part of the positive pressure moving that 1% towards renewable energy sources and greater efficiency standards.
Product managers have an opportunity to apply leverage as buyers / licensors. Vendors should have to satisfy your sustainability criteria. There are some tools for this. For example, a web check tool and API from The Green Web Foundation for checking whether websites are “hosted green”. You can also ask existing and future vendors for their sustainability credentials. Decision-makers (e.g. procurement team) can help you build this into your questionnaires for vendor selection.
I asked various software providers to set out their own sustainability criteria. It was clearly not a request that some of them receive very often, and there was quite a delay in hearing back — with the exception of Amazon (AWS). This is not a sponsored post!
I’m not going to name and shame those vendors who did not have a clear answer. I would rather “call in” and educate than “call out”. Suffice to say that they were very large enterprise providers of SaaS platforms and cloud services. Clearly, I did not leverage my position as a buyer at the time of signing. It will be a very different story going forwards….
That’s all for now, folks
To recap, product managers can build software products that are climate-positive. Start by taking the following actions:
- Understand that you can make a difference (Link)
- Learn enough about carbon efficiency to understand your power and responsibility (Link)
- Empower your team with strategic objectives that champion sustainability and true discovery. Double down on value, cut product bloat (Link)
- Adapt your favourite frameworks to champion the voice of the planet
Please share the word across the Product community. We can make a difference.
