10 easy sustainability steps product managers can take (that also save money)
Sustainability in digital products is not a separate workstream. It is what happens when a team reduces waste in demand, data and delivery.
Why should PMs care?
Economically: wasted clicks, retries, heavy pages, unnecessary “real-time”, and data hoarding inflate cloud spend, supplier cost, support demand, and operational risk (UK Government, 2025).
Environmentally: the same waste consumes energy through compute, storage, and data transfer. UK government guidance now explicitly expects teams to minimise environmental impact and design services to reduce impacts across their lifecycle (UK Government, 2019; UK Government, 2025).
Below are ten steps you can take this month. Each one is PM-owned and easy to translate into backlog language.
The 10 steps
1) Add a “non-build” option to every decision
Do: ask if the need can be met via content, policy, process, reuse or removal.
Why: not building avoids ongoing run cost and footprint.
Line to use: “What is the lowest-impact way to meet this need?”
2) Make “real-time” an explicit requirement (not a default)
Do: set refresh rates and background job frequency as a product decision.
Why: constant polling and always-on processing silently drives cost and emissions.
Acceptance criteria: “No polling more than every 15 minutes unless user-critical.”
3) Put a page-weight budget on your top journeys
Do: pick your 3 highest-traffic pages and set a max transfer size.
Why: lighter pages reduce data transfer, improve performance and cut retries.
Acceptance criteria: “Top journey pages stay under X MB on first load.”
4) Design out retries and “check status” behaviour
Do: add clear status, timestamps, reference numbers, and “what happens next”.
Measures: duplicate submissions; repeat visits; contact rate per 1,000 users.
5) Default to “smaller” unless the user truly needs bigger
Do: compress images, cap uploads, offer high-res as an option.
Why: smaller payloads reduce bandwidth, storage, failures and cost.
Acceptance criteria: “Uploads are compressed by default; max size X unless exempt.”
6) Make data minimisation a product rule
Do: only collect fields and analytics events you can link to decisions.
Why: every extra datum adds long-term storage, backup, security and retention overhead.
Line to use: “If we will not use it, we will not collect it.”
7) Make retention a product decision (not a technical default)
Do: define retention for logs, uploads, exports, and audit data.
Why: “keep forever” becomes permanent spend and permanent risk.
Acceptance criteria: “Logs retained X days; exports deleted after X days; uploads archived or deleted after X months.”
8) Treat third-party scripts as a costed choice
Do: require a value case and a review date for any new third party.
Why: third parties often add weight, requests, privacy/security overhead, and hidden costs.
Acceptance criteria: “No new third-party scripts without documented user value and a removal plan.”
9) Reuse first, build second
Do: add a “reuse check” in refinement: existing components, patterns, platforms, shared services.
Why: reuse reduces duplicated systems and duplicated run cost.
10) Pick two measures and report them every fortnight
Do: choose two “waste signals” you can keep up forever.
Why: what you measure is what survives delivery pressure and government guidance explicitly expects teams to measure and reduce impacts (UK Government, 2025).
Good starters:
page weight on top journeys
duplicate submissions / repeat contacts
polling frequency on key endpoints
storage growth and retention compliance
The 10-minute habit that makes it stick
At the end of refinement, ask:
What demand does this create? (and how do we prevent repeats?)
What data does this create? (and how long do we keep it?)
How often will this run? (and can it run less?)
References
UK Government (2019) Government Design Principles. Available at: GOV.UK. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles
UK Government (2025) Environmentally sustainable services. Available at: GOV.UK Service Manual. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/design/environmentally-sustainable-services