Connecting with my Roots: Product & Environment

Intersection of Product and Environment

I cried the first time I visited a wastewater treatment plant (happy tears). Growing up in South Florida, surrounded by nature, I developed a deep-rooted care for the environment and that passion led to me creating Tesla’s first centralized environmental data management product.

Joining Tesla as an EHS Specialist, I realized how limited environmental software solutions were. After all, Health and Safety problems took precedence and environmental folks were crafty enough to keep operations going. However, in a data-driven company like Tesla, in a time of ESG and Impact like the 2020s, the old adage “what isn’t measured cannot be managed” rang true.

Catapulted into my first Product position at Tesla, I was faced with so many problems from our environmental teams and so little time.

Finding a Problem That Matters

It’s easy for technical folks to jump into solutioning before defining a solid problem. I was guilty of making this mistake earlier in my career (blog post coming soon on this!). My first goal was to listen to understand, not solve. Speaking with environmental compliance professionals across Manufacturing, SSD (Sales, Service, and Delivery), and Energy globally, I found some key problems around the prevalence of manual data entry, amalgamated spreadsheets housing overlapping and conflicting data, and vendor reports that can’t be joined due to differing definitions and labels. Tesla’s newly formed sustainability team responsible for sustainability and Impact reporting also had similar issues sourcing auditable data.

It was apparent that the root of the issue was the lack of a centralized place to compile and harmonize environmental data.

Some problems that didn’t make the cut were: differing waste management processes across manufacturing sites globally and a lack of an air emission control device inventory. They were important, but had dependencies on a stable foundation of data management first.

Prototyping a Vision

Armed with a problem the size of Tesla, my second goal was to understand how other softwares in the market tackled this issue. Looking at software offerings from Gensuite ESG, Intelex, and Microsoft Sustainability Manager one of my biggest gripes was their limited data models. They was helpful in fine-tuning and simplifying data models to serve only Scope 1 or 2 reporting, but they missed the big picture and left a big group of users (environmental compliance folks) out of luck. 

I had a vision to create Tesla’s central environmental data management and orchestration platform, enabling end-to-end master data management to calculation under one roof. Despite it not happening how I originally envisioned, having a vision allowed me to easily recruit others to my goal and quickly get support.

I created the first Excel version of this tool which was used to collect data for Tesla’s 2021 Impact Report. 

“Wait, Anthony, why didn’t you make it a software?” - You

“Well, the problem didn’t align with the organizational goals at the time and software resources were used for other initiatives mainly in Health and Safety, so I made an MVP with the tools I knew how to use: Excel & VBA.” - Anthony

I was rudely reminded that Excel is not scalable, often crashing as over 100 people tried working in a file, and data governance in Excel is a nightmare, trying to enable custom passwords by location and metric type. But, it got a lot of environmental people to work together in one place, compiling information and cross-checking each other’s work, which was a huge win in my book.

In August of 2022, I pitched my idea for a comprehensive data management solution with the learnings of 6 months of prototyping. It was rejected by 1 leader out of 5. 

“If the problem is getting solved now, why do we need to invest in this solution?” - Sr. EHS Director asks

I took this opportunity to educate. Calculating the rows of manual data entry required to enable the Impact Report metrics and the findings from internal and external auditors to reinforce my case. Presenting the facts showcased the significant risk under the hood, and with upcoming EFRAG regulation in the EU, we negotiated to begin development in 2023.

Collaboration Drives Innovation

With approval in hand, I was quick to rally relevant business stakeholders together to form a product requirements document. Working with leaders and individual contributors across Finance, Internal Audit, EHS, Environmental Management, Sustainability, Facilities, Operations, and Data Engineering, I compiled a comprehensive list of user stories and prioritized them based on regulatory impact, link to organization goals, and user experience. Features that didn’t make the cut were left as post-MVP plans after launch.

My firm belief is that collaboration drives innovation, especially in the solutioning phase. With the problem defined, a prototype tested, and an initial list of features, it was time to work with software engineering and design to make it happen.

Flying onsite to Tesla’s Fremont Factory, I met with 2 lead software engineers and a designer to hold a 2 day workshop.

During this workshop, I spoke on what is environmental compliance and sustainability reporting, how are things currently done, where are we failing, and what we hope to accomplish with this software. This was packaged under my long-term vision for a comprehensive environmental data management tool. 

My idea for “Product Hat” was inspired by this workshop. I encouraged stakeholders to wear their "product hat" and think like a product manager with me. This approach got me valuable feedback:

• Original product process flow was edited to be more scalable for future use cases based on input from software engineering. 

• User flows were streamlined by design to be more intuitive and require less clicks & pages.

• Database architecture was adjusted to accommodate external data connections.

• MVP scope was able to be accomplished in less time. 

Value That Speaks for Itself

The product had three major components to it, each one developed before the next starting with Master Data Management, then Data Assignment, and finally Data Collection, to produce numbers that had the traceability and auditability of financial data. 

Go-to market, or in this case internal deployment, was done with the help of a Project Manager where I guided the milestones for a deployment strategy; creating QRGs (quick reference guides), SharePoint pages with short tutorials based on user flows, and global trainings and Q&A sessions. Adoption was quick as the user flows were well-defined and permissions customized the user experience in the UI, hiding/showing different features based on user persona.

The focus on consolidating external data into one tool solidified the product as a centralized platform for all environmental data, displaying data from multiple internal and external sources for validation in 1 place, saving time and rework which previously plagued the organization.

Ditching spreadsheets for a software solution effortlessly enabled the calculation of newly created sustainability metrics in dashboards and reports to continuously monitor progress; making what is measured, now managed.

Lessons Learned

There were a lot of times over the course of the 2+ years in creating this tool I doubted myself and the vision. My worst fear was wasting everyone’s time & trust on a product which didn’t solve a meaningful problem. Owning the operational failures and inefficiencies is what got me through. I like to say I am problem-obsessed as much as I am customer-obsessed, because when me or my team’s steps falter, I need to have a strong north star to re-center the next action.

As a Product Manager, people expect you to think big and will expect big things from you. Embrace this and start. Prototyping in Excel got me feedback I would have never gleaned through conversations alone. Get out of the office and experience the pains for yourself and prioritization becomes less of a mystery.

-Anthony Splendor