As a product manager it is important to stay up to date with the latest market trends in your industry. Some of my personal methods for keeping up to date include subscriptions to publications and newsletters from industry experts, tracking publications from key clients, news alerts based on key industry terminology, and conversations with clients, executives, sales reps, client services, and other internal subject matter experts. Through these channels I was able to identify a major trend in corporate governance that would be critical for Glass Lewis to address, a newly coined topic called “ESG”.

The growing popularity of “ESG” (Environmental, Social, and Governance) data and intelligence stemmed from several sources including regulatory changes in Europe, increasing prominence of responsible investment coalitions like PRI, and the increase of environmental and social cataclysms that dramatically impacted public companies. These factors drove an increase in demand from institutional investors for underlying ESG data that could be used in decision-making.

Glass Lewis had already been a market leader in corporate governance data, particularly for the use-case of proxy voting decision-making, but newer entrants into the market focused on environmental and social data and primarily on the use-case of investment decision-making. These factors led me to prioritize discovery in this area to better understand the risks and opportunities for Glass Lewis.

My starting point was conversations with our environmental/social research team to understand our current dataset, expertise, and capabilities. We also performed some “blue sky thinking” to consider the type of product they would offer to clients if they had no limitations. Once we had shaped enough of an idea I put that into a “product one-pager”, a template that I created to guide and structure the ideation process so that all stakeholders could share understanding about the idea, the customer problems, our goals, business value, and early-stage potential solutions.

After receiving approval from the executive team to move forward with further discovery I kicked off some customer interviews and low fidelity wireframing. These conversations helped to guide the specific data that clients were interested in and the ways that we might offer something unique when compared to competitors. As the potential solution gained in clarity I brought in a senior developer and UX designer to help shape the new ESG Profile Page in a manner that would be feasible to build. After several iterations we were ready with an MVP design and could start building.