Inflight Magazine #1: Starting points for greener digital products
by Imogen Lees ✦ 26 October 2022 ✦ 3 Min Read
Inflight Magazine is our irregular newsletter where we share the latest product thinking, updates from the products we’ve built, and tips for happy product teams (like ours).
In Issue #1 we chat top money tips and three starting points for sustainability.
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Three starting points for sustainability 🌱
When was the last time sustainability was your top priority?
A recent penny-drop moment was when we realised we can have the greatest impact on the environment by building green digital products for our clients. More than we ever could by cycling to work or recycling our milk bottles (oat, obv).
Tip #1 🌱 For anyone wanting to understand digital sustainability, Tom Greenwood will get you started with some green design and dev principles.
Tip #2 📈 Book a workshop with Dan at PMZ4NTZ (that’s Product Managers For Net Zero if you’re not down with the kidz). We learnt there’s a huge benefit to low-carbon websites: they’re very fast. And less load time = higher conversions. WINZ WINZ.
Tip #3 🕸 Consider redesigning or rebuilding your website with Dan's green principles. We just did and now planes.studio is cleaner than ~72% of websites tested on websitecarbon.com. Here’s how we did it.
Money makes the world go round 💸
Maybe it’s something about working in tech, but we’ve had finances on the collective Planes brain recently.
There’s definitely a crossover with our projects: we’ve built a few investment platforms, including one for NFTs, and right now we’re figuring out how to get paid in Crypto...
It’s also a tough time for everyone with the cost of living going up.
And turns out, none of the useful stuff was taught in schools. *shock*
One of our PMs Wing set up a personal finances channel on our Slack and shared a whole bunch of awesome resources on money-making. For beginners, start with the UK Personal Finance Flowchart.
Sophie, as always with her ear to the ground, organised a Fika (our version of lunch and learns) with finance wellbeing experts Bippit.
Our Fikas are open to everyone, run monthly and virtually, and you should join in the fun next time.
Life’s too short for boring work 🛹
Remember that time when travel was like an expensive game of snakes & ladders and government regulations were changing every second?
Well, Qured were trying to launch a new product in this market. And we were there with them every step of the way, coming in as their ready-to-go product team to get their U.S. site up and running in just 4 weeks.
Wow, that’s fast. How the hells bells did we manage that?
1x off-the-shelf platform to build a flexible site.
1x product instead of 100s fit-to-fly tests.
1x dedicated team. Get the full scoop here.
Products + businesses we wish we’d built 🧱
Square Mile Farms : Vertical farms
Linear: Nicer than Jira 👀
Makers: Build websites with Figma
Handbrake: Easy video compressor tool
Spline : Design 3D websites
Fern : Better manage your user research
Content roulette 🎯
Some of these articles are ours, some of them aren’t. Click on the ones you want to read and the all-seeing marketing tracking gods will tell us if we’re interesting or not!
Revenue is a vanity metric: how to build an authentic business plan
When's the right time to start thinking about DEI when you're a small business
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