Building Sustainable Products

Every day we hear about sustainability. Mostly the discussions revolve around energy, the environment, agriculture and building green. The principles of sustainability though are equally applicable to products, product lines and companies.

Whether you consider the Hannover Principles, established for the 2000 World’s Fair in Hannover, or the Economic Principles of Ecolab, the fundamentals are the same: build products in a way that respects the environment, the community and the future, while delivering real value in a lasting way. In other words – build for long-term value not short-term gain.

Some Product Management Sustainability Principles might be:

1. Build products and service offerings that fulfill a real need for the customer. Focus on win-win scenarios.
2. Build the minimum feature set to get the job done efficiently. Resist the temptation to add extra features or complex, but cool, technology components. Extra features introduce waste and raise maintenance costs, decreasing sustainability and innovation.
3. Partner with complimentary products and offerings; opt to buy rather than build another ‘me to’ application.
4. Build flexible solutions rather than one-offs to close a deal. Resist the pressure to make a change for one customer; this undermines the entire ecosystem and introduces expensive and unsustainable complexity and maintenance requirements.
5. Leverage learnings across the organization and the industry. Information breeds confidence and confidence sparks innovation. Throw open the curtains and let others know what you’re doing. Include others in your company, your customer base, your industry peers and even your competitors. Build a wiki, publish papers, post in forums, write blogs, Twitter. Sharing enables us to reuse and extend our technologies.
6. Just say no. Practice restraint when the next new idea or bright shiny object comes along. Evaluate it, test it, push on it. Be prepared to walk away rather than squander resources on something that isn’t core to your business, your product line or your customers.
7. Just say YES! Look at what others are doing and what your teams are thinking about. Leverage wherever possible if it supports your core offerings or solves a clear problem for your customers. Invest where it makes long-term financial sense to do it.
8. Learn. Talk to you customers, analysts, other people in your company. Attend conferences, read books, blogs, papers. Listen to Podcasts, Vblogs, Webinars. Keep expanding your knowledge and expertise.
9. Recycle!. Retire products that consume more resources than the return justifies. Reuse what you can to build a new product or offering, but get out from under the burden of products that are sucking resources to maintain or stabilize them but not offering new profits.
10. Life-cycle-Analysis When preparing to build a product or a new version, look at the design from the whole life cycle of creation to retirement. Streamline and reduce waste right up front. Thinking about how the product might be retired will inform design decisions that will stand the test of time.

Many of these principles are incorporated in Agile/Lean development processes. As product managers we can influence and steer our products and portfolios toward sustainability for our customers and our shareholders.