5.1 Have an ethical and sustainable product strategy

Produce policies and documents showcasing evidence, achievements, and onboarding underpinned by good governance.

Public documents: Machine-testable
Develop, publish and maintain key policies, such as a code of ethics, product guidelines, sustainability statements, and/or other documents that include language specific to digital products, services, policies, and programs. Make these publicly accessible and transparently versioned formats.
Achievements and compliance: Machine-testable
Publish achievements, features, compliance, and anything beyond the scope of these guidelines within a dedicated sustainability section.
Governance over time: Human-testable
Provide evidence to demonstrate how digital sustainability policies, climate policies, and related practices are effectively implemented, monitored, and governed over time.
Onboarding new members: Human-testable
Provide training decks and workshops to support onboarding new team members in relation to sustainable product strategies.
Documentation: Machine-testable
Document your methodology through impact storytelling, documentation, and creating resources to help individuals make more informed decisions and raise awareness among your users.
Carbon-free evidence: Machine-testable
Demonstrate how digital products and services are powered using carbon-free energy.

Economic
Communicating the ways you can share the economic benefits of your digital work raises awareness of social inequalities. Similarly, enabling users to make more informed decisions can ensure your project is more financially sustainable overall.
Environment
Establishing clear sustainability statements should make it easier to align organizational policies and practices with measurable metrics and support goals. Integrating this early in the digital product strategy can improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact.
Operations
Establishing ethical and sustainability policies can help to ensure product teams are more engaged in the work they are doing.
Privacy
Reducing your emissions and explaining to your audience how you aim to keep to your sustainability commitments provides the opportunity to highlight other key issues of interest to your users, such as privacy and security. This can boost user trust in your brand.
Social Equity
Highlighting intersectional social issues in documentation, storytelling, and marketing materials raises awareness of problems and potential solutions.
Transparency
Maintaining clear and public-facing policies helps internal and external affected partys to better understand an organization’s sustainability commitments, while making it easier to report on the impact of these efforts.