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Bring Sustainability into the heart of your process!
Whatever part of the product lifecycle you operate in, you can bring sustainability into every and any step of your process. This series we call ‘Twisted Techniques’ where we will look at what changes you can make to processes and techniques you already use in order to build more sustainable products, in a more sustainable way.
To begin, let us look the overall Product Discovery Life Cycle.
The double diamond is a well known design process model adapted by the British Design Council from the divergence-convergence model created in 1996 by Bela H. Banathy. It is the basis of most product development models in our current era. At Green PO, we have extended the double diamond to encapsulate/describe Sustainability twists to the model in order to provoke and enable sustainability to be brought into the heart of the product design and development process.
Often, Green product owners have an understanding of sustainability, circularity and what a sustainable product is, but they want to know how to build more sustainable products. The Green PO Sustainable PDLC offers help and new thinking patterns at each stage of the product development cycle, to enable sustainability to be brought into the heart of the process at each stage.
The model helps teams and individuals step away from the lofty Sustainability company or individual goals that have no influence or impact at the team level, bringing control of sustainability issues back to the product owner and the development team. If you work in a Product development team and want to make a positive impact on the sustainability of your product, the Green PO PDLC model is an excellent way to do this.
The model is for professionals who shape products. It can be used by individuals or by product teams, or by coaches to bring sustainability into the heart of the process.
In this section, Green PO will not define the double diamond model as this is well documented in multiple places (see the bottom for references). Instead, each section of the double diamond will be re-examined and extended with a sustainability lens, in order to enable more sustainable products to be developed in a more sustainable way.
The sustainability lens widens the problem and research area of any problem as it asks people to become holistic thinkers instead of simply focusing on the specific area on which the problem lies. The reasons for this are several, with the easiest way of describing it overall as the interconnectedness of all things, specifically wicked problems of the world creating unintended consequences when the lens used initially is too narrow. Especially at the start of you and your products sustainability journey when the knock on effects of specific solutions, materials and/or design patterns are unknown to you, your team and your company, we at Green PO ask that you take a little time in your research to seek a wider perspective.