Fighting Climate Change Through Product Management
As product managers, we have a responsibility to society. We are the people who decide which products get built for which customer segments, and we are the people who spin up the strategies that guide our businesses for years to come.
It’s on us to set the standard for both which products to ship as well as the processes through which we ship them; and, we’re responsible for ensuring that our products are compassionate and inclusive.
One crucially neglected focus area in inclusive product management is climate change. Climate change is one of the most pressing global issues of our time, as it has drastic implications for the environment, economy, and human health.
Below, we analyze what the problems of climate change are, and why these problems threaten the software product management industry. We then share recommendations for product managers to bring into their day-to-day work.
Afterwards, we discuss the commitments that we’ve taken here at Product Teacher to mitigate climate change. We then wrap up with an announcement of an incentive program that we’re spearheading to help drive action.
The problems posed by climate change
Climate change is the result of human activity that has substantially increased the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gasses in the Earth’s atmosphere. These gasses trap heat from the sun and cause the average global temperature to rise. This rise in temperature has long-term, catastrophic effects on our planet, including rising sea levels, more frequent and destructive natural disasters, and changes in global weather patterns.
Climate change threatens our way of life. It leads to more frequent and intense natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and droughts. This puts people and communities in danger, and can cause billions of dollars’ worth of damages. It also affects food production, leading to higher food prices, food insecurity, and increased malnutrition.
Climate change also affects ecosystems and the wildlife that inhabit them. Warmer temperatures can cause sea ice to melt, leading to a decrease in fish populations and the destruction of their habitats. Changes in weather patterns can also disrupt migratory patterns of birds and other animals, and can cause entire species to become extinct.
Additionally, climate change leads to an increase in air pollution, which can cause asthma, allergies, skin diseases, cancer, and other respiratory illnesses.
All of the above consequences means that climate change imposes deep economic costs to industries and societies. Extreme weather events can cause major disruptions to businesses, leading to loss of income and reduced economic growth. Access to energy may become less stable, leading to increased energy costs. Reduced health in working populations means a loss of productivity worldwide.
Climate change is an issue that affects us all; but crucially, significantly more of the climate change burden is being shouldered by the most disadvantaged groups.
The effects of climate change are more pronounced and longer-term for disadvantaged communities, which lack access to resources and resources to help them cope and adapt. People living in poverty are less likely to have access to financial resources to help them rebuild after extreme weather events.
Even worse, they are often forced to live in areas that are at greater risk of flooding, due to their proximity to bodies of water, and they are also more likely to experience health problems due to air and water pollution.
Climate change also affects people’s ability to find food and water. Low-income households often do not have the resources to ensure stable access to food, and when the climate changes, their access to food becomes more limited. Furthermore, water shortages can occur in areas where water is already scarce, making it even harder for low-income communities to access clean drinking water.
Climate change can also threaten the security of low-income areas, as extreme weather events can create an environment of chaos and instability. This can lead to an increase in crime and violence, as people are forced to find new ways to survive in their new environment.
So we now have a clear view of how climate change impacts society. But, how does all of the above impact product management as a profession?
The impact of climate change on product management
Climate change matters to product managers because our job is to create value for people, and what people value depends heavily on the conditions within which they operate.
Climate change harms people’s ability to make a living, thus reducing their ability to purchase products. In other words, climate change actively reduces the total addressable market for digital products as a whole, because people and businesses are less and less able to spend time, money, or attention on purchasing or adopting products.
And, it’s not just about whether people can pay for our products or not. As climate change worsens, we may find that many people can’t use our products even if they paid for them.
We take much of the underlying infrastructure for our digital products for granted. Most of the time, product managers don’t question whether their users have access to electricity or to the internet.
But climate change threatens that assumption. Without a stable world to live in, we won’t have any internet or electricity with which to deliver our products.
As more and more power outages happen, and as critical infrastructure fails due to operating in novel conditions (e.g. flooding, extreme temperature, etc.), fewer users will be able to take advantage of our products and receive value from our products.
If we want the profession of product management to continue into the next century, we need to take action now.
As an aside: the total addressable market for digital products focused on addressing climate change (e.g. carbon credit markets, greenhouse emissions tracking, etc.) will continue to see growth over the coming years, due to the changing conditions of our planet. I encourage PMs to explore greentech as a promising vertical.
Recommendations for PMs to tackle climate change
Software product managers have a critical role to play in combating climate change and its downstream consequences; we influence without authority, and we provide recommendations to senior leaders within our organizations.
Through our influence, we as product managers can reduce the carbon footprints of our businesses while strengthening the sustainability of each respective business model.
For the sake of our discussion, we won’t be covering recommendations that apply more broadly to employees in general, such as asking leaders to sign petitions or making direct donations to nonprofit organizations.
Here are three recommendations for how you can fight climate change through your day-to-day work, specifically as a product manager in tech:
Promote virtual and async work to reduce office commuting
Use no-code low-fidelity prototypes to quickly iterate through ideas
Encourage stakeholders to use renewable energy instead of fossil fuels
The best part is that all three of these recommendations also create tangible value for the business, including stronger margins, deeper engagement with customers and investors, and stronger access to engineering and design talent.
Promoting virtual work
Product managers influence the way in which their teams work, including engineering, design, QA, analytics, and other stakeholders.
One way for product managers to take action against climate change is to promote virtual work to reduce office commuting. Commuting causes pollution, and offices require significant energy to power. Working from home means saving on commutes and saving on office power.
Telework is a great way to reduce the need for commuting to the office. By cutting down on the number of times that we and our teammates need to drive to work, we can significantly reduce the emissions of our businesses.
Commuters drive an average of 32 miles per day to and from work, which adds an estimated 3.2 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. Teleworking even one or two days a week makes a meaningful difference in the fight against climate change.
Working from home virtually can also reduce the amount of office space needed for teams to work together effectively. By reducing the need for a physical office outside of our homes, we can help our employers cut back on their energy usage, saving them money in the long run. Without the need to power computers, lights, and other office equipment, our businesses can significantly reduce their energy consumption and help to reduce their carbon footprint.
On top of that, when people work from home, they typically find it easier to focus, which can lead to increased productivity and fewer mistakes.
Of course, pivoting from colocated work in physical offices to virtual work-from-home setups requires more than just saying “let’s do it” - we need to change the way that we work together as product development teams. Thankfully, many of us already have some exposure to working from home due to the global pandemic.
Key tactics to keep in mind when doubling down on virtual async work as a PM:
Pin the team’s priorities somewhere visible e.g. Slack
Provide meeting agendas ahead of time, write meeting notes, and send action items
Put rough thoughts into collaborative first draft docs and ask people to directly make comments or edits, rather than wait for perfect product artifacts
Carve out time for teammates to optionally catch up with you one-on-one
Help others connect with you by keeping your webcam on by default; but, help others recover from webcam fatigue by letting them keep their webcams off by default
For non-urgent and important decisions, give your team at least 24 hours to digest context and provide their opinion; don’t decide on the fly without them
If your leadership team has expressed resistance about working virtually, sit down with them to understand what pain points and concerns they have. Empathize with their objectives and let them know that your goal with async work is not to replace or eliminate the benefits of working in person, but rather to supplement those benefits.
Remind them that async work can help drive more productivity and better collaboration from people of different working styles (e.g. introverts, working parents), and that async work tends to create better documentation and stronger institutional knowledge across all teammates. Furthermore, enabling remote work means that we can bring on talent from multiple geographies, enabling us to build better products for our customers and drive better profits for our investors.
Once you have some initial buy-in, run small pilots of async work, with the dual purpose of mitigating fears from the leadership team while demonstrating the value of virtual work and virtual collaboration.
Leveraging rapid iteration and agile prototyping
Imagine a company that uses waterfall processes to build a product over the course of three years. At the end of these three years, it finds out that the product it built was the wrong one.
That’s three lost years of people’s commutes to work, three lost years of marketing, three lost years of operations, and so on. When companies ship non-viable products using waterfall methods, they harm not just their investors and their customers, but they also harm the planet.
Imagine if we had used low-fidelity prototypes to identify within 3 months that we had picked the wrong product direction, and that we should select a different customer segment, or a different customer pain, or a different solution idea.
Reducing the “time to wrong answer” from 36 months down to 3 months means that we save on 33 months (2.75 years) of pollution and emissions.
Through rapid iteration and prototyping, we can help our teams and our businesses reduce greenhouse gas emissions while driving increased customer value and stronger profits for investors. Staying agile means eliminating waste and driving sustainability.
As product managers, we must continually push our executives, our stakeholders, and our teammates away from waterfall processes such as deadline-oriented roadmaps or static product requirements docs. After all, today’s markets evolve in the blink of an eye, and our companies must be able to respond quickly to changes in customer demand and trends.
This means that companies must take risks and try out new ideas, even if they are not always successful. Rapid iteration and prototyping can help with this by allowing organizations to test and refine their products and services quickly and efficiently.
The next time we plan to ship a v2 or a v3 of our product, we should instead sketch out our proposed scope on pen and paper, and we should run this sketch by our customers. Our customers don’t need to see a fully functional v2 to tell us where our product could provide them with more value and to share the pain points that we’ve failed to address for them. This method applies whether we’re building B2C products, B2B products, or internal products.
We don’t need to write code to know whether our next iteration will solve customer pain. We can use rough sketches to quickly validate or disprove ideas, especially as we continue to see the growing adoption of high-quality prototyping software that non-designers can leverage.
Switching to renewable energy sources
Our digital products contribute significantly to global electricity usage. Therefore, it’s crucial that the electricity that our products use is sustainable and renewable.
In 2019, Accenture reported in the Harvard Business Review that “by 2040, [the tech sector] is expected to account for 14% of the world’s carbon footprint - up from about 1.5% in 2007.” Furthermore, “data centers consumed about 2% of global electricity [in 2019]; by 2030, they could consume as much as 8%.”
As product managers, we’re responsible for ensuring that our products create positive value for our customers, for our business, and for our investors; and, we can attract better engineering talent and design talent by ensuring that our products are sustainable and environmentally friendly. Therefore, it’s on us to push for renewable and sustainable electricity for the creation, maintenance, hosting, and usage of our products.
Thankfully, switching to renewable energy sources is a solved problem in many countries, including the United States. According to the US Department of Energy, “at least 50% of customers have the option to purchase renewable electricity directly from their power supplier.”
Ask your leadership team where your company purchases its energy from, whether the energy they’ve purchased is carbon-free, and whether that provider will let you purchase renewable electricity. In many cases, this switch is simple and only negligibly more expensive than non-renewable options. As a reminder, the benefit you reap in increased customer engagement, investor engagement, and job candidate engagement can easily outweigh the costs.
If your energy provider does not have a green energy option available, companies can always buy energy through long-term contracts called power purchase agreements (PPAs). Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and other leading tech companies purchase dozens of gigawatts of clean energy each year through contracts like these.
Outside of the direct energy usage of our companies, we should also consider the indirect energy of the tools and platforms that we use to ship products. Ask your engineering team where your software is being hosted, as the data centers that host our software may not be carbon-neutral, and we can always switch to one that is more aligned with societal good. This WIRED assessment compares Amazon AWS vs. Google Cloud vs. Microsoft Azure.
In terms of switching to renewable energy, the most important role you play here as a product manager is that you’re asking questions and starting conversations. While you can optionally decide to lead the charge, you don’t necessarily need to do so; your facilities management teams and your devops teams are likely better candidates for taking the lead.
The point is simply to influence your stakeholders towards making more planet-friendly decisions, in a way that doesn’t force them to sacrifice profitability or efficiency.
Taking climate action as a product manager
You’ll notice that none of the above recommendations require a radical change in your day-to-day work; we’re pragmatic enough to know that product managers have infinitely many decisions to make and infinitely many problems to solve.
That’s why we’ve focused our recommendations above on low-hanging fruit that every product manager can weave into their day-to-day work. We’re not asking product managers to give up their incomes and volunteer full-time at climate change nonprofits, nor are we asking product managers to invest significant political capital into driving large-scale transformation campaigns.
While the actions above may seem small, they add up and create meaningful long-term value for our customers, our executives, our investors, our teammates, and our planet.
But, fighting climate change through product management cannot solely be led by individual product managers; the problem is too big to be solved only through individual action. That’s why we’re eager to take action as an organization, with the hope of inspiring collective action at other product orgs.
Our climate change commitments at Product Teacher
At Product Teacher, we believe that doing good business means doing good for the world. We won’t be able to realize our vision of making product management easier for everyone if the planet becomes unfit for human life.
We’re proud to share that we are signatories of the SME Climate Commitment as part of the United Nations Race to Zero campaign. As a signatory, we are carbon-negative this year, which means that we reduced more greenhouse emissions than we produced; this accomplishment is possible by funding and investing in clean, renewable energy projects. We fully plan on staying carbon-negative as long as we are in business.
One way that we stick to this commitment is by conducting all of our work virtually, which reduces emissions. We provide virtual executive coaching for product leaders and virtual group workshops, rather than taking emissions-heavy flights out to our customers all over the world.
On top of that, we recognize that climate change is not just about reducing carbon emissions. One key consequence of climate change is that clean water is becoming more scarce. Therefore, we have also committed ourselves to being water-usage negative.
Through our contributions to clean water projects, we are able to create more usable water than the water that we consume. We’re proud to be active corporate citizens of California and to fight the regular droughts and water shortages that California experiences.
But, we don’t just want to change the way that our business operates. We want to encourage our customers and our students to also tackle climate change through their product management careers.
That’s why we’ve spun up an incentive program to help our customers succeed in product management while also fighting climate change.
Our incentive program with The Carbon Almanac
Because software product managers have an important role to play in combating climate change, we see that tying professional development for product managers together with proactive climate action is a powerful way to create a more compassionate future for all of us.
The Carbon Almanac is a book about climate change that was collaboratively written by hundreds of writers, researchers, thinkers, and illustrators that focuses on what we know, what has come before, and what might happen next. It lays out carbon’s impact on our food system, ocean acidity, agriculture, energy, biodiversity, extreme weather events, the economy, human health, and best and worst-case scenarios. Visually engaging and built to share, The Carbon Almanac serves as the foundation for a global movement to fight climate change. Seth Godin, a well-respected marketer, spearheaded the effort to bring the Carbon Almanac to life.
In support of the Carbon Almanac, Product Teacher will provide a course subsidy for anyone who has purchased this book. This incentive program aims to encourage people to learn more about the devastating effects of climate change, and to take the necessary steps to reduce carbon emissions.
Here’s how the program works: send us an email at admin@productteacher.com with a receipt that includes a purchase of The Carbon Almanac book (either the physical book or the ebook). Please put your receipt in the body of the email rather than as an attachment; we won’t open attachments due to the risk of downloading a virus. Here’s an email template you can use.
In return, we’ll provide you with a redemption code that gives you free access to three months of our Monthly PM Masterclass series, used by product managers at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and more to upskill their careers.
In other words, we’re providing $70+ of product management knowledge (the value of 3 months of our masterclasses) at the price of $15 (the cost of The Carbon Almanac).
If you’re interested in purchasing your own copy and haven’t yet done so, here’s a link to purchase on Amazon. We don’t earn any commissions or ad revenue from your purchase.
With this incentive program, we hope to encourage more product managers to become actively involved in the fight against climate change.
Of course, we know that this incentive program is only a drop in the bucket. We know that we aren’t perfect as a company, and that there’s a lot of improvement ahead of us.
For example, the courseware that we use to host our PM courses haven’t committed themselves to carbon-neutral goals. We’ve invested 20+ hours into researching viable alternatives, but we haven’t yet found such a provider.
That said, we aren’t going to let perfection get in the way of progress. Product management is all about shipping positive impact ASAP. We hope this initial step helps us pave the way to take even bolder steps in the future.
