The climate struggle is real.
If you were in Southern California last weekend, you felt Tropical Storm Hilary sashay past. It could have been worse. Hilary was fast-moving and weakened by abnormally low coastal water temperatures north of Cabo San Lucas on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Nonetheless, the storm crossed the Mexico-California border, sporting tropical storm-strength winds and saturated clouds eager to satisfy promises of heavy rain and localized flooding.
A steady light rain fell all day Sunday in North San Diego County. The rainfall total was over two and a half inches, modest by tropical storm standards, a substantial increase over Carlsbad’s August monthly average of 0.0 inches. Put in context, Carlsbad soaks up twelve inches of rain a year. Sunday was the third 24-hour period this year recording over two inches of rain.
Hilary scattered damage across Southern California. Our neighbor’s waterlogged, rotted tree waited until Tuesday to fall into our yard.
If you watched news coverage of the storm from afar, most outlets did you a disservice. Over and again, breathless newscasters repeated the alarming possibility that “parts of California could receive more rain in one day than is normal for an entire year.” The reporting omitted an important fact: the part of California was Death Valley, which averages just 2.2. inches of rain per year.
Death Valley did indeed experience greater than its annual average rainfall on Sunday, resulting in significant flooding across the region. Just over a month ago, temperatures there hit 53.9 degrees Celsius–for my base ten illiterate American friends, that’s 129 degrees Fahrenheit–the sixth hottest recorded temperature EVER. Death Valley is having a hell of a summer.
Los Angeles’s 2023 has been downright weird, with Angelenos experiencing two once-in-a-lifetime events in six months. February brought a major winter storm and the county’s second-ever blizzard warning. Six months later, August piled on with a first-ever tropical storm warning. Downtown LA received three inches of rain, and Beverly Hills endured nearly five.
Post-Hilary blues.
Monday, I woke wondering whether the day-to-day software stuff truly matters. Is it important to call a particular role a product manager, product owner, or growth product manager, and since when has this business ever NOT been about growth? Which of the thirty-eight books that will make me a great product manager should I start reading? Am I worrying enough about the data I use to measure my product’s success?
I usually head out for a surf to ponder such questions. I do my best thinking in the water when I focus my brain on interpreting the ocean and scanning the horizon for waves. However, the Health Board recommends staying out of the water for 72 hours after significant rainfall. You'll know exactly why if you went down to a north county beach on Monday or Tuesday. The smell of sewage was overwhelming.
The rain we experienced on Sunday sent toxic runoff into the local coastal waters. Raw sewage, toxic chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers, petroleum byproducts, plastics, and garbage flow into the ocean unimpeded. Surfers, swimmers, snorkelers, and divers risk infection and exposure to “chemicals known to the State of California known to cause cancer, birth defects, and other reproductive harm.” Toxic pollution levels have closed some southern San Diego beaches for almost 600 consecutive days. Two billion pollution-choked gallons (yes, billion!) have flowed through the Tijuana River surge since Saturday. The treatment plant on the US side of the border, operating at more than two times capacity, simply discharged the overflow untreated sewage directly into the ocean. That’s 35 million gallons of raw sewage in a single day.
Product managers of climate.
Coastal inhabitants see rain forecasts and know this is coming. It’s like the scene in The Matrix when Agent Smith holds Neo’s head on the subway tracks and soliloquies about the inevitability of his impending death. How do we leap out of the way in time?
Rational people become irate when thinking about climate change. The numbers overwhelm us, and the scope of the problem grows daily. We experience once-in-a-lifetime weather events repeating annually with a mix of fear and awe. People you might otherwise respect deny it’s happening at all.
But anger, fear, awe, and ignorance don’t solve the problem.
Writ large, climate change is simply too large to solve. It’s a batch-size problem. Good product managers build things that change the way we experience the world. They do that by breaking a problem down into small, feasible deliverables. A smaller batch size is precisely what we need to tackle climate change.
So, I started thinking about climate change like a product manager.
Reducing the batch size.
Deciding to make the batch size smaller is the first step.
There is garbage on the beach. There is big garbage, which is easy to spot, lying half buried in the sand. And there's small garbage; the microplastics floated on currents from the Great Pacific garbage patch, fingernail-sized and smaller chunks hiding amongst the kelp and seaweed in the tide line.
I can't get all the garbage off the beach; there's too much. What if I could choose a 100-meter stretch of beach, lifeguard tower 34 to tower 35, and make it 1% better? Set your task to take as much garbage from that 100-meter stretch as possible in an hour.
Now that you have an achievable goal, what is required to accomplish that? A reusable shopping bag, a pair of gloves, and, in my case, a functioning pair of glasses. And then time. Just an hour.
Ship it.
Weight tells only part of the story about how much garbage you’ve removed. Counts give better data. Ten cigarette butts. Three toy propellers. Seven plastic flossers. Twelve plastic straws. One hundred seventeen plastic fragments smaller than 1cm. A syringe.
Doing this once or twice a week is too much for one person to make a dent. So, I decided to add some capacity. I learned to bring three friends and collect three times as much.
Building the product
I need to collect ninety times as much garbage to make a real impact. The next goal is to scale garbage removal. Scale requires infrastructure and participation; you need volunteers, a way to get them there, and supplies for collection and disposal. The field of play is a state beach run by the California State Parks and Recreation Department. Parks and Rec regulates special events, requiring scheduling, permits, and liability insurance.
It’s time to build a product.
Start with the vision. “Carlsbad State Beach is among the cleanest beaches in the world, an example of how a small group of volunteers can eliminate 99% garbage and microplastics from the local environment. Other groups across the globe use Carlsbad State Beach as a model for achieving a cleaner, healthier coastal ecosystem.”
Then, the strategy. “Establish a monthly beach cleanup with established local volunteer programs like the Surfrider Foundation and in cooperation with the California State Parks and Rec department to collect, catalog, and dispose of garbage and feed that collection data into programs creating policies to protect our environment better.”
A good product strategy frames the product. Our “product’, in this case, is the beach cleanup. To succeed, the cleanup will need supporting infrastructure and features. Luckily, Surfrider has already “open-sourced” their beach cleanup model and funded all the necessary features to build your product.
Infrastructure
Special event permit
Liability insurance
Site infrastructure
Cleanup site co-captains
Garbage collection, inventorying, and disposal
Volunteer recruiting and coordination
The basics:
Meet and greet tent and table
Gloves
Reusable collection bags
Picker-uppers
Data cards
Volunteer waiver forms
Volunteers:
Event promotion
Volunteer sign-up and event reminders
Check-in QR code
Volunteer orientation and event kickoff instructions
Data card distribution and collection
Build the roadmap and the feature delivery sequence to support your vision and strategy.
I hit the phones to confirm the permit requirements, secure a date for the first cleanup, and establish a monthly cadence. Surfrider San Diego’s beach cleanup coordinator, the amazing Gabriel Racca, submits the permit application, the proof of insurance, and the volunteer services agreement.
And just like that, we have permission to clean up the beach on October 28, 2023.
Next, we’ll promote the event, recruit volunteers, and gather sign-ups through the Surfrider San Diego beach cleanup site and the Golden Volunteering app.
Most features are delivered just in time on the day of the event. I’ll load gear into my truck and set it up on the beach. As volunteers arrive, we’ll brief them on the day’s objective and distribute collection tools and data cards. Then, I’ll collect bags, count the objects, tally the results, and record them in Surfrider’s database. It’s more than an hour, but it creates scale and impacts, however small, on climate change.
Call to action
If you are in San Diego, join me on October 28, 2023, at Carlsbad State Beach Tamarack from 9 to 11 am. Come for as long as you can spare.
If you aren’t in San Diego, consider making a one-time or ongoing donation to support Surfrider’s beach cleanup and environmental protection efforts.
Thanks for helping me build a product.