Green PO Ladder
What is it?
The Green PO Ladder is an instrument that helps product owners and managers to start building more sustainable products while acknowledging personal motivation and stakeholder constellations.
Which problem does it solve?
Many product professionals want to shape their products but are overwhelmed by the complexity of sustainability change. The Green PO Ladder helps them to structure their effort.
Who should be involved?
The instrument is for professionals who shape products. It can be used by individuals or by product teams.
How does it work?
The ladder includes five steps:
Ambition: Define your ambition. Do you want to change things within your control? Do you need support from your direct team? Do you need support and change from colleagues in the company? Do you want to change the way an industry does business? Do you want to change the way society operates? The ambition level defines the scope of the following steps.
Inspiration: Collect examples that inspire you, your team, and your colleagues. Inspiration helps spark change and helps people see how it can be done.
Context: Understand the rules of success within your context. Commercial, environmental and social sustainability must go together to create a lasting impact. Therefore, it helps to find the formula for commercial success and then integrate environmental and social actions that reinforce commercial success. The 🪷 Green Product Ikigai can be used to find this combination.
Allies: Identify and bond with allies. If ambitions span beyond the individual area of control, other people need to support the effort. Allies can sit in multiple functions: Can sales sell more with a more sustainable product? Maybe finance colleagues appreciate lower capital costs for a more sustainable business? Maybe the sustainability office is happy to get support in achieving its goals? Maybe strategy colleagues appreciate ideas on how to have a more competitive offering?
Tools: Select suitable instruments to help build a more sustainable product. This might start with measurement, for example, through a 🔎 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This overview ➿ Applying Circular Economy to Product Management describes key improvement strategies for physical products.
Despite its linear representation, the Green PO Ladder can be climbed in iterations: first with a more minor ambition and step by step with higher ambitions.
What to be cautious about?
The sequence of the steps matters. The ambition influences which inspiration is needed and which context needs to be looked at. Understanding the context helps to turn colleagues into allies. And only allies will provide the support that will implementation - hence the application of tools - possible. However, measurement tools can be used for inspiration, understanding the context and winning allies.
Where to find out more about it?
The Green PO Ladder is an actionable simplification of the 🖼️ Green PO Framework that helps to understand the context a product is built in.
Who contributed to its creation & development?
The creative process is mostly a collective cultural process of creation, inspiration, copy & remix. Therefore, the following entries shall be understood as markers of significant milestones of this concept, not as an exclusive and exhaustive list of all people involved.
The Green PO Ladder was created by the team of Green PO.