Leaving 4G Capital; a retrospective
April 19th will be my last day with 4G Capital, an East African fintech where I’ve been chief product officer for almost three years. It’s been the most transformational experience of my career and a great period of growth, so this is a reflection on all of that.
What went well?
Building a good team
My proudest achievement in any job is the people I help develop, and 4G has given me the best experience thus far. When I joined in August 2021, the product team was three people, doing a decent job despite the pressures of Covid and a bad dynamic between sister teams in tech and ops. Today we are fifteen, predominately in Kenya, with layers of experience and a truly good vibe.
Through a roughly 50/50 blend of experienced hiring and internal development, we’ve been able to create a learning team that gets stronger every week. The former cohort have enriched ways of working with their own expertise and histories, and the latter have thrown themselves into the challenge of product management with the support of those around them. I love this mixed and unfussy approach to team building, and it’s cemented my belief that so long as you hire for attitudes and behaviours, the hard skills can be learned.
Creating a better interface
From a design perspective I’ll be forever proud of taking a behemoth of an internal platform and making it nice to work with. Early on we spent vital time sweating the detail on what tasks were most important to our colleagues and customers, and building a ground up design-system that focussed on this.
I was fresh from Lloyds Banking Group and had the voice of Miles Sampson in my head (a wonderful ex-colleague), who had been passionate about designing colleague and customer experiences in unison. I took this idea and ran with it, and today 4G has a parallel colleague and customer interface ( the latter is due to for MVP launch soon). We’re tracking the productivity improvements of colleagues using the new interface, and for key business tasks the difference is clear.
Showing a different kind of leadership
I am not your typical leader, so it’s been lovely to get so much validation from the teams I work with on how useful my style has been. As mentioned above I inherited a difficult working environment, and it was tempting to attempt to fix this with too much of my own opinion and history. Instead I focussed on the people (within the team and key stakeholders), building trust and setting the example over time that tough conversations would have more value than fancy sounding structures.
I still get a thrill when the team alert me to a gnarly situation, whether it’s an impossible deadline riddle or seemingly insurmountable stakeholder upset; I’ve learned to relish these as opportunities to create stronger colleagues on all sides, encouraging people to lean into the awkwardness and see from the perspectives of others. 4G has an incredible future ahead of it with many more difficult conversations to have, and I’ll be happy if some ‘Ross-isms’ help along the way even when I’m not in the room.
Launching a whole load of stuff
From a whole new platform, to various service and product innovations, through-to a multi-million-dollar lending programme on behalf of one of the biggest payment providers in the world, we’ve delivered a lot. There’s too many things to mention, but some that stand out for me include:
- Streamlining our educational content so that customers have a clearer learning journey on topics such as ‘setting business goals’ or ‘keeping business records’.
- Launching new loan products with EV partners, to help drive the green economy in Kenya.
- Integrating with National ID databases to improve KYC and protect customers and 4G from fraud.
What didn’t go well?
Not starting with an MVP
My big objective was to overhaul the entire technology platform (backend and frontend), and my single biggest regret is that we neglected the basics of agile / MVP ways of working, and went with a big complex build instead of starting small. There’s a variety of reasons for this that are worth another post on their own, but in summary it was a combination of ways-of-working differences, a rapidly growing team who needed to be fed with shaped work, and a busy business to support alongside the build.
We got there in the end, but it cost time and caused a lot of frustration. So in hindsight I wish I’d been more awkward and insisted on a barebones build to begin with (showcasing the handful of key functions that drive the business).
More time in country
I live in the UK and the majority of the team is in Kenya / Uganda, as is the customer base and supporting operation. I’ve been over about fifteen or so times since joining, but it’s not enough. Perhaps for a more established team the balance of remote versus in-person would work, but for a team that was growing, working on a large and interconnected build, I know I would have achieved more had I lived in Nairobi.
This informed my decision to move on, as I realise more and more the power I have in being present among teams. Spotting scope-creep, helping disconnected colleagues and using common-sense design-thinking is so much easier when you’re in the room.
That said, what time I did spend in Kenya has been a real privilege; it’s a beautiful country and so full of energy. If you’re reading this and get the chance to work / relocate to East Africa, do it. The pace of change is electrifying, and for product and design people tired of European problem spaces, it’s a thrill to build services using different technology patterns and for different behaviours.
What did I learn?
The benefit of a product / design hybrid approach
I see a lot of ChatGPT generated noise on Linkedin about convergence in these areas, but little real shared experience. From my perspective it’s been a massive benefit to take a design mindset into a CPO role. I treat everything as a design challenge, whether it’s an interface, an equation that calculates affordability, or a regulatory submission.
The basic design mentality of thinking about the user, reducing complexity, and creating patterns means that our product team is able to process, shape and deliver any request that come our way. We’ve not consciously hired designers, but have instead hired smart product people and treated them like designers. We’ve coached sister teams to act as our researchers, created a team training programme to upskill everyone as product designers, and share lots of real-world case studies on a weekly basis.
The benefit of a few mantras
As I get into the more senior phase of my career (i.e. old), I find myself repeating the same phrases over and over. At 4G Capital these have been:
- Everything can be simpler — complexity is easy.
- Nobody comes to work to make your life hard — see from their perspective and have the difficult conversation.
- Achieve a small number of meaningful things daily, rather than be mindlessly busy.
There are more, but the three above have steered nearly every conversation I’ve had, and it’s rewarding to see members of the team adopt these and use them back on me. So much of work is noise and bluster, and so I’ve learned to lean into these core beliefs that help others through the tougher times.
That 4G Capital is a really exciting company with a great mission
It’s cheesy to end on this note, but I really love 4G. The combination of lending and financial education makes for a really compelling customer proposition. The emerging simplicity of our technology sets us on a path for incredible growth opportunities over the next few years. And the wonderful people that work at 4G will ensure it delivers on all of this.
In my resignation conversation with Wayne, the CEO and founder, we discussed ways to keep me involved as an extended part of the family. I’m not sure what shape this will take yet, but I’ve promised the team they’ll see me again.
So it’s kwaheri from me, and pole sana to anyone from the team for my terrible efforts to learn Swahili.
