01. Measure the environmental impact of your products
Why does it matter?
Understanding the source of your product emissions is important to prioritize the most effective pathway to reduce emissions. It will also help you realize the impact of digital technologies to your operation’s overall carbon footprint. Since most emissions from digital products originate from your supply chain (scope 3), measuring them can be challenging, as you depend on suppliers to provide this information and data points.
Nonetheless, as you cannot improve what you cannot measure, your journey towards sustainability must commence here to create a more impactful, deliberate, and effective action plan.
What can I do?
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Connect with the right people: It could be your ESG team, sustainable leaders internally, facility manager or external providers such as consulting firms with some experience in carbon accounting
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Quantify your product’s value chain (scope 1, 2 and 3) carbon emissions and perform a cradle-to-grave lifecycle analysis on your product (or even better “cradle-to-cradle” if relevant)
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Include impacts from cloud services, devices, networks, and data centers across their life cycle (manufacturing, distribution, usage, to end of life)
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Choose the right metrics and make sure you can measure them fairly quickly to begin assessing improvements
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Identify measurement frequency and who’s leading the effort
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Pinpoint cost savings and top-of-funnel opportunities that can be achieved and how that directly translates into emissions reduction opportunities
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Make “Sustainability part of product success criteria” rather than a separate metric to track. (see Set environmental OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to know more)
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Identify someone in your team to represent environmental aspects/concerns of your product during standup meetings.
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Repeat annually or in line with your business development strategy
What does success look like?
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Collective efforts to gauge and reduce ecological footprints
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Cross-departmental participation in green initiatives
Things to consider
As a product leader, it’s important to recognize that you can Influence your value chain and partners beyond the digital realm, Influence and collaborate with internal stakeholders, so that it becomes easier to Prioritize Climate Initiatives.
As an example, if shipping emissions are a big chunk of the emissions profile of your e-commerce business, you could lower emissions by reducing the return rate of your physical product (by helping users buy the right product, at the right size, colour, specs, etc.) and by partnering with sustainable, electric local shipping companies. In 2024, around 20% of items purchased online are returned (this rate goes beyond 50% in the clothing industry!). Global returning costs are estimated at over $100 billion. A simple back of the envelope calculation shows that for a company with $10M in annual revenue, reducing the return rate from 20% to 10% would save approximately $450,000 in revenue and remove 8t of CO2 emissions from shipping and packaging waste.