2 years as chief product officer for an East African fintech
It’s been a while since I last wrote about what I’ve been doing, so here’s a post to reflect on the year as a whole. It’s been a rollercoaster so here goes…
Delivering product
Ultimately as CPO my job is to ensure we’re delivering product that has value to the customer and the business. In the past 12 months we have launched a new backend, a new colleague desktop interface and a new colleague android interface; we have teams operational on this, and through Q4 we will complete the full company migration. We’ve launched a loyalty programme for customers, more customer-centric collections processes, streamlined comms (reducing cost and improving customer experience) and kicked off a major 5 year programme with a global payment provider to superpower Kenyas female entrepreneur community. In short, a lot.
Important to note the above is a complete team effort. Product sit in the middle, often feeling the heat from both sides, as tech require more time, and business look to expedite key items. This constant pressure has been tiring, but comes with the territory and so a big focus for me has been modelling positive methods of dealing with conflict whenever it arises.
Building the team
I’m really proud of the international collective we’ve grown and shaped over the past 12 months. In summary, we have 5 product managers (senior through to more junior), 2 project managers, a pilots / partnerships lead, a product design lead and two operational SMEs who help fulltime with pilot activity. This team is primarily in Nairobi due to the need to be fully plugged into the customer and the operation, but several of us are UK / Europe based.
Over the past 12 months we’ve experimented with different configurations, including the inclusion of more business analysis (useful as we were chunking through the big build), and we continue to evolve our ways of working to best reflect the work around us. Our new CIO is excited to get the team more hands-on with the tech, speccing APIs and making best use of the platform, something I’m very keen on as I believe good product people need to have a handle on how things work.
Team building is my happy place and I’ve loved seeing personal development across the board. One such evolution has been Douglas, who joined as a PO with an interest in design, and is now leading design full-time. Through some external coaching, some internal training, and a whole lot of learning-on-the-job, his journey is just beginning as we get deeper and deeper into human-centric-design. He’s written more about it here.
In addition I’ve used a lot of my background to coach the team on service design, creation of personas and doing the hard work to make it simple. We ask any new joiner to bring their own expertise to the table, so our superstar project manager Juliet has been coaching our team and others on good practice around timelines and costing.
Longing for a time machine
As we get into the final phases of the migration to the new platform, we’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on what could have been done differently. With the help of some external consultants we’ve stood awkwardly in the mirror and pointed out all of the flabby bits, which is never a fun process. Away from the glare of the spotlight, I’ve spent a lot of time examining my own role in the process and what I could have done differently:
- Starting with the mission and purpose —too often we fell into analysis-paralysis, gathering lengthy spreadsheets on how things work, and lots of long workshops gathering requirements. In hindsight starting with a framing of “what is our mission, and how can we achieve that in the simplest way?” would’ve been more helpful, and avoided the natural desire to replicate a decade of legacy complexity.
- Challenging and reaching simplicity — linked to the above, I could have been tougher and more awkward with the need to reduce and remove the needless processes that had accumulated prior to me joining.
- More time in discovery — an obvious own goal, and so easily done. So many deliverables would have benefited from a week or two more being poked and prodded before going near build.
- Small working prototypes — also linked to all of the above, having simple tangible working things would have highlighted misalignment faster.
Usefully this process of reflection has given me a shorthand in ongoing conversations. “Lets learn from project X” or “why are we going down this path again?” are incredibly useful phrases to avoid repeat behaviours. As Einstein said:
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Looking to 2024
Once we have the migration done, our roadmap comes alive with exciting innovations that enable a vision that has not changed. To fulfil on our mission of growing business with capital and knowledge, I cannot wait to expand on the digital services we offer customers, further superpower our field teams, and make better use of data to personalise our products.
Aside from the roadmap, I look forward to more growth in the product team, and helping to unlock huge leaps in the teams personal development. I also look forward to sharing more; I’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging and speaking publicly about this, but am immensely proud of our story so will be doing much more next year.
