Product managers' job is to create exceptional experiences for their customers. CEOs are responsible for maximizing profits to sustain their companies.
Billions of tons of consumer and industrial waste pollute globally the oceans, soil and beautiful landscapes. Millions of employers are quit their job because they are not happy or even their health is affected.
Can a shift in corporate mindset and especially in product management help keep customers happy, employees happy, the earth healthy, and still generate the profit needed to keep the company going?
Three ideas to be resourceful in the product development process:
- Develop product strategies that meet real customer needs and avoid product failures. It saves thousands of hours per product development to discuss ideas and solutions, ordering, storing and then scrapping materials when they are no longer needed. Shipping, storing, and scrapping absorb labor, gas, fuel, water, electricity - all natural resources that are finite. It also burns the company’s profit.
- Happy employees are more creative and productive. A development process that starts with finding a customer problem and systematically documents all steps facilitates communication, helping product managers, project managers, engineers, marketing, sales, executives, the procurement department, and external partners to do their jobs efficiently. This reduces both internal working time and high costs for external developers, such as engineers, marketing, and designers.
- When designing the product solution, the creative team can think about resource-saving and user-friendly production, ecological materials, preventive maintenance, and recycling methods. Besides, the packaging of a product is usually thrown away. So why not design a sustainable solution that has less volume and uses reusable or recycled material?
Each single step towards mindful product development helps to create a better business and ecological environment.
Read more about Green Product Development™ and Green Product Management™.
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About the author
Ulrike Laubner-Kelleher is a passionate product manager. For more than 20 years she has been involved with innovative products and the optimization of development processes. For many years, she has managed and trained the product portfolios in international product management. She has held leading positions in product development, strategic and operational product management.
