05. Prioritize Climate Initiatives
Why does it matter?
Your product backlog reflects your strategic and tactical priorities. As such it holds great potential for engagement with your stakeholders and communicating what is important for the product moving forward and why. Refine it with your team to incorporate and address climate considerations as part of the process. Once tickets are prioritized into a sprint, you will have identified and mitigated some climate risks and impacts.
What can I do?
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Create user stories specific to climate and sustainability that will help to support your entire product (systemic impact across features)
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Consider how your product influences user behavior in ways that impact the environment. For example, does your product increase or decrease overconsumption? Does it help your users feel drained or revitalized? What if your product also helped customers adopt more environmentally-conscious behaviors? Here’s an example from the Visa Behavioural Insight Lab.
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Use tags to identify climate and sustainability-specific user stories
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Consider energy consumption and GHG emissions during grooming and sprint preparation. Some features may be ‘oversized’, and others may be more energy-consuming or complex than you thought.
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Ideate on early-stage solutions and compare their environmental impact. For example, pose sustainability-focused creative constraints during early-stage ideation to push your team to think of low-impact solutions.
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Assign an estimated environmental impact to user stories or product increments, including both backend and frontend impacts
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Prioritize sustainability-specific user stories (if relevant) in your sprint planning
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Consider a climate-focused sprint as a means of applying all the best practices discussed. Standardize this practice by ensuring that the same discussions continue to take place on an ongoing basis, for each new version/release of your product
What does success look like?
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🧑💰 Enhanced user experience leading to improved conversion rates and overall satisfaction
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🌍💰 Adoption of cleaner electricity sources for operations
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🌍 Established targets for reduced carbon and greenhouse gas emissions
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Customers are making more environmentally-conscious choices as a result of your product
Things to consider
Track your digital footprint and leverage data to explain and support the prioritization of climate features that will help reduce your emissions.
We recommend that you keep the discussion about the impact you are trying to achieve rather than the specific way to improve performance and metrics. Empower and trust your team to know what to do if you are clear about priorities and acceptable trade-offs. Aim for improvement, not perfection. Making climate part of the prioritization process is a huge step forward!