Episode Notes  It's not enough to just make a product more sustainable. At the end of the day, you also need to capitalize on that sustainability improvement because it’s an investment.  In this episode, we answer how understanding the six stage gates to developing any product is essential to leverage sustainability improvements. We also discuss using single sustainability scores, trade-off and decision-making hierarchies in organizations, and why life cycle thinking is essential to not lose customers in today’s market.    In this Episode  Neil, as a product manager, how have you seen sustainability embedded into product development?  Neil - I have been a product manager for software. So, it's slightly different than when you're looking at physical products. But I think more of my experience has come from my work with product managers and engineers in the manufacturing space and that kind of formalized itself into a bit of a product management structure that I think would be good to explain to answer that question. [00:36]  If you look at the toolkit of the product manager there are six stage gates to developing any product. It starts with Discovery, where the goal is to find ideas. You could be looking at new technology on the market, demographics (who is buying what). There is a big green trend that has been going on for the last 20 years and is increasing. [1:01]  Product development is a messy process. There is no straight line. But I’m trying to create these buckets [stage gates] that describe this process, starting with Discovery, where you have an epiphany that could help your product or business. [1:30]  The second stage is desktop research [Scoping phase], which is done mostly on your computer. You are trying to build hypotheses (will it work, is it going to be better, is there a different market to address, is it a bigger market, is it viable?). There is not a lot of team activity at this stage. [1:48]  When you are looking at sustainability at this stage, you might do some crude life cycle assessments (LCA)s. [02:14]  Example - Consider a new kind of battery that is low weight, high power for an e-scooter or for a more sporty vehicle. Would you be able to create the battery for a vehicle with 1000 km range? You're trying to create hypotheses and ask are people going to buy it? Is this even technically viable? Have people done it before? [02:25]  There's a lot you can see about what is already available in the Scoping phase. It doesn't make sense to create a new battery if your main market segment right now is the Middle East or China. These things are not obvious. You may say it's a battery, it must be better, but that's not always the case. When you look at it from the entire lifecycle, the biggest impact from a battery comes from the use of it when you charge it, and the kind of grid you charge it from impacts the overall performance of that product. Using a lifecycle perspective at this stage allows you to understand and rule out some of these hypotheses that do not make sense. [02:50]  The next stage is Business Case. You are looking at it from both a technical perspective (will it work) and from a market perspective (if it were to work, will it make business sense). You might ask: Will it be twice as expensive? If it is a new market segment, will anybody buy it? How big is the market segment? If it’s a new geography, will you be able to address that geography? [03:27]  When c...