Sven, the eco-conception commitment tool for SaaS products

Entrepreneurship - Product Design

Pitch

Sven is two things.
Sven Monitor
A solution to monitor the carbon footprint of a digital product.
‍Sven Label
An eco-conception certification given by expert and the monitor eco-score.

Team

Hugo Chapelain - Product Designer
Loana Gentric - Product Designer
Alphonse Bouy - Developer Full Stack
Maxime Bergerard - Developer Full Stack
Hugo Drillaud - Product Owner
Lucie Zaccardi - Business Manager
Marin d'Assignies - Business Manager

What is
eco-conception for digital products?

A rather foggy concept attracting more and more attention to the product community. Principe Green defines it as "an emerging discipline at the intersection of climate science, software practices and architecture, electricity markets, hardware and data center design."

First, eco-conception was considered a "nice to have".

Today's European legislation tend to democratize the control of digital activities impact, therefore making it a requirement just like GDPR. Indeed our digital activities represents a non-negligible part (4%) of greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than the impact of civil aviation (3.5%).
By 2025, it is estimated that the share of digital emissions will more than double (~8%).

You may know the “Fight against obsolescence” from 17 August 2015, or the recent REEN law “Reduction of the Digital Environmental Footprint” from 15th November 2021.
In Europe, other laws apply: the “Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive” and the “Europe Fit for the Digital Age & European Green Deal”.

We have every reason to believe that more precise and restrictive laws will appear soon.

Scale-ups want quantifiable carbon equivalence

"All resources are a source of emission. The heart of the problem comes from a bad mobilization of those resources."

CSR Manager and Chief Information Officer of Société Générale

CSR Engineer @ Withings

Society today is still very immature on these topics. We're bad at measuring the carbon footprint of our actions, purchases, and behaviors.

First thing we realized is how bad we are at tracking the emissions of our product ressources. Few reliable solutions exists to estimate carbon equivalence of websites ; one of them being the Green-IT-Analysis extension.

For almost two months we studied the market, all the ecosystem of scale-ups, their tools, and workflows.

One of the most sticking interviews we made was with the CSR Manager and Chief Information Officer of Société Générale, who stated that measuring emitted carbon is a complex challenge.

Discovery Design Sprint

Notion screens presenting a guide for interviews and Google Meet screens with an expert and a potential user

Generative & Evaluative Research

One week to crack the best way to incorporate eco-conception into everyday tasks

The famous design sprint was the perfect exercise to test our idea, gather users’ feedback, and validate or not our hypotheses.

Can we give an overview of the ecological impact of a feature?

Can it be integrated seamlessly into the team's workflow?

Can we influence the validation decision of a feature based on its ecological impact?

We were well aware of the governance challenge that represented the integration of a new tool among product teams. Therefore, this is the segment of the user journey that was prototyped and tested.

“If you succeed in developing this, I’m your first beta tester.”

We learned from our first user testers that the concept was quite appealing and innovative. However, they argued that the prototype was still too binding and its functioning did not provide them with all the arguments to convince their direction to buy a new tool like Sven.

Can we give an overview of the ecological impact of a feature?

Yes. We can give a score, a carbon equivalent, and recommendations for every feature. The carbon equivalent is not a hundred percent reliable, but it explains the range of the product's impact and gives understandable numbers to compare one with another.

Can it be integrated seamlessly into the team's workflow?

It has to be. Product teams are used to tools that connect to their software almost instantly. Therefore, the Figma plugin is a no-go, too long to set up, and has too many unknowns concerning the final product. Even if our research pointed out the importance of introducing eco-conception at the decision-making and design stages, we quickly learned that this is not a good approach.

Can we influence the validation decision of a feature based on its ecological impact?

No. Companies executives often do not consider it a top priority. This behavior is understandable since eco-conception does not yet appear as a consequent benefit to the business. Nevertheless, an increasing number of scale-ups acknowledge the necessity of sustainable digital usage. Thankfully, institutions and big companies have already begun to mention some mandatory eco-conception criteria in their contracts, encouraging everyone to learn about the subject. Therefore, our mission at Sven is to accelerate the adoption of eco-conception before implementing it into product teams' workflow becomes too painful.

Scale-ups want quantifiable carbon equivalence

Scale-ups need to identify which features of their product they need to optimize first.

Creating the identity of Sven

Sven Manifesto

"Hard-working and fractious, Sven does not lose itself in speculations and goes straight to the point.
As an early activist, Sven's goal is to radically raise awareness, propelling people towards more responsible use of digital and get people to think for themselves. Aware of the unique problems of each ecosystem, Sven's continuously search for ingenious solutions to initiate this transition in as many organizations as possible."

Sven branding was going to become a serious subject at one point. With our very versatile team, we wanted everyone to take part in the creation of our brand.
At the time, we didn't even have a name for our project. We used to call it "Trustcarbon" for the prototype but we knew it won't do.
Alongside one of the other designers of the team: Hugo Chapelain, we created a workshop to gather everyone's vision and expectations.
The key intakes after this workshop were the values we wanted to convey, the tone of voice we would use, and the personality we would give to our brand.

Eco-conception equals frugality

Sven shows engagement and pragmatism through a impactant branding

Sven, the eco-conception commitment tool for SaaS products

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