The three goals that guide all our product decisions
The challenge of climate change is complex — and solutions can be, too. While we've worked hard to make Klima look and feel simple, there's a lot of thought, strategy, and hard work under the hood. Today, we're sharing a closer look at how we prioritize what to build next.
Hello. I'm Rosa, Product Manager at Klima. In August 2020 I left my fintech job in London and moved to Berlin to join the fight against climate change with Klima. Since then, we rolled out our Beta and launched our app, and now, thanks to hundreds of dedicated members, we’re well on our way to starting a carbon neutral movement.
Last month, Jonas, our Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, gave a sneak peek at some of the features we hope to build in the next year. We've got a lot of exciting stuff planned: a more detailed Carbon Calculator, greater flexibility in how much you can offset, additional payment methods, and celebrations of your carbon footprint achievements! There are many more features we could build to make carbon-neutral living radically easy, effective, and enjoyable: the opportunity is massive.
While we hope to eventually build all these features, we can't do everything at once. We're still a small team (but growing!) and we need to be smart about how we prioritize.
We have three goals that help us decide what we should build next:
Make it as simple as possible to offset and reduce your carbon footprint
Make the experience enjoyable
Make sure we’re achieving maximum impact for the climate (the big one!)
Let’s take a closer look at each of these goals.
Make it as simple as possible to offset and reduce your carbon footprint
We're striving to build a product that makes offsetting and reducing your carbon footprint as simple as possible. So many of us care about our planet and would jump at the opportunity to help fight climate change, but don’t know how. At Klima, we want to unlock that potential and put the powerful tool of offsetting and reducing in as many hands as possible.
We've already made a lot of progress to making offsetting simpler. We’ve built a calculator to help you quickly work out your carbon footprint, and we’ve done the research to find effective, verified, and sustainable projects to offset with. Still, we are working on other ways to make offsetting an easy choice: for example, offering further payment options, such as Google Pay and PayPal.
We also want to make reducing your footprint simpler. The first step in reducing is understanding which parts of your life contribute most heavily to your footprint and which can you most realistically hope to change. We've got big plans for the Footprint Tab. We want to make it easy to understand your footprint at a glance by breaking it down into lifestyle areas. We’ll offer more, and more achievable, suggestions of how to reduce your footprint in each area. You’ll be able to play with these suggestions to see the impact on your footprint, before committing to the action.
Make the experience enjoyable
We know there are many apps vying for your attention, and each one needs to earn their spot on your phone. We think offsetting your carbon footprint is a worthy competitor to your Spotify subscription, but we're not taking any chances. We want to create an app you'll love, and keep. And hey, you're helping save the planet — that should feel good!
We've already got various counters in the app that help you see exactly how far your monthly subscription goes. Soon we’ll be introducing a new feature: "Achievements." Here, you’ll be able to see all the offsetting and reduction milestones you’ve reached, and celebrate them!
Make sure we’re achieving maximum impact for the climate
Finally, we want to enable everyone to reach their greatest potential impact. This is why we're building more flexibility into our offsetting plans: if you want to offset more than your own personal footprint, we don't want to stop you!
You can also increase your impact by persuading others to join, too — as with offsetting and reducing, getting someone you know on board should be easy and enjoyable! We plan to make sharing Klima simple, and show you the massive impact of such a small action.
Ultimately, everything we do at Klima is geared towards the goal of getting as much CO2e out of the atmosphere as quickly as possible. This is a big goal, which generates a lot of ideas! Breaking it down into smaller steps, such as the three goals above, helps us organize and prioritize many ideas, and build the most effective product.
Is there a feature that you think will help achieve these goals? Reach out at hi@klima.com to chat about it!
