How can product leaders begin optimizing product-level data to facilitate carbon emission reductions? The scale and urgency of the transformation required to fight climate change has never been more clear. Building hardware and software products, acquiring the funding and creating a diverse community to enhance talent capacity and to drive innovation, is essential to tackling this global environmental crisis. In this episode of Product Talk, Silicon Valley Bank (a Division of First Citizens Bank) Climate Tech SVP Maggie Wong will be interviewing GreenSwapp Founder and CEO Ajay Varadharajan to discuss leveraging machine learning to aggregate, analyze and present emission data in a consistent format, building a data infrastructure API tool to scale product-level carbon accounting, as well as the importance of understanding target customers and anticipating their future needs to enable product development that serve diverse use cases.
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Show Notes
- Watching Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth inspired Ajay to focus on climate change.
- Ajay has an extensive background studying various aspects of climate science.
- Green Swap aims to solve the challenge of slow product-level carbon accounting calculations.
- Moreover, the company aggregates and standardizes inconsistent product data from multiple sources.
- Machine learning models are used to match ingredients to research and extract useful data points.
- Lack of data standards and retailers’ low tech adoption present challenges for Green Swap.
- Political uncertainty around regulations keeps Ajay concerned.
- However, diversity brings different perspectives that can help solve climate change problems.
- Moreover, many opportunities exist to solve climate problems using new technologies, such as optimizing product-level data.
- Nevertheless, awareness and willingness to act on climate change lag behind the scale of the problem.
- Tera.do is recommended for learning about climate change and connecting with others.
- Work on Climate and Climate Action Tech are active product manager communities.
- Customer discovery and understanding pain points is key for product managers.
- Translating customer insights directly into features leads to successful products.
- Ajay aims to apply Green Swap’s algorithms to other sectors like fashion.
- Furthermore, the goal is to provide carbon data for any product from any retailer.
- Additionally, communities can help product managers interested in climate tech careers.
- Staying close to customers helps plan effectively and maintain competitive advantage.
- Automating carbon accounting can reduce analyst work by 6-8 months.
- Finally, diversity in problem-solving enriches solutions to climate change issues.