07. Onboard Developers and Designers
Why does it matter?
Product managers have significant influence over the ‘Definition of Ready’ and the ‘Definition of Done’. Embedding climate considerations into your day-to-day product design and development process will drive a culture of sustainability in your business. This will set the tone and expectations for the acceptable practices and values the team should aim for and provide clear frameworks to follow during planning, design, development, and release phases.
What can I do?
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Create Internal training or leverage from existing ones on key environmental priorities, and deliver these trainings on a regular basis
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Provide a learning resource portal (internal wiki) as a shared source of information relevant to your team. Add to existing knowledge base if already in place
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Define a weight budget (in KBs) or carbon budget (in CO2e) to respect in your Definition of Ready (DOR) on a certain page or scenario
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Choose the right tools to measure test case and acceptance criteria (more in Track your digital footprint)
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Make sure it includes front-end and back-end impact
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Verify if best environmental practices have been embedded into the user story (e.g. [Avoid obsolescence tactics](avoid-obsolescence-tactics, verify usage of multimedia, Optimize multimedia files, Minimize data transfer by applying a “minimum by default” approach for specs, etc.), more on this in the next 2 chapters
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Run tests to verify if best environmental practices have been implemented correctly
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Identify when and why the DOR or Definition of Done (DOD) are not followed and leverage this learning opportunity to identify challenges, clarify concepts, and refine your product process
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Share successes during sprint reviews or demos, highlighting the environmental value created and the value for the business, users, and the environment
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Use a sprint review or demo to excite your stakeholders over the benefits and impact of your environmental improvements or achievements
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Discuss climate success, surprises, and failures with your squad during the sprint retrospective. Sustainable Design will likely be a new skill and add new considerations for everyone. The retrospective is a great opportunity to improve, learn from each other, clarify climate concepts, etc.
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Monitor environmental impact after each release/sprint
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Look at which features are not used, and remove them. That will be less features to maintain and devs should be happy!
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Co-create your internal low-carbon and low-impact playbook, toolkit or manifesto with your team. Include repositories of best practices.
What does success look like?
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🌍 Collective efforts to gauge and reduce ecological footprints
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🧑💰 Efficient utilization of data centers and servers for greener operations
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Your team understands the product’s impact and is aligned on key leverage points for impact reduction
Things to consider
Focus on starting small and building momentum with your team if it’s not possible to implement all the best environmental practices at first. Spend time with your team to ensure all members understand the impact your product has on the planet. Consider prioritizing a spike to Choose the right metrics your team would be able to advocate for. As your team gets excited with the results and sees value in the approach and its impact, it will become easier to raise the standards.
We recommend you find ways to track the adoption of sustainable practices in your team over time and across the other product teams. Having a visible and tangible way to measure it will make it easier to identify and address challenges. We recommend that you look out for solutions that can help you not only create your climate playbook (like what you’re reading) or toolkit, but also disseminate it throughout the organization and teams. See tools page for a list of solutions.