Its Pitch Day! After three weeks of working hard on their hackathon projects, the innovative fellows at IFA are ready with their pitch decks to present to the judges, we have three guest judges Brin, Sima and Wura. Everyone is excited and some like me are getting the jitters. Err... before I continue there's a saying about not putting the cart before the horse so let's go to the beginning- the hackathon.
The awesome facilitators at IFA - a program to inspire innovators- organized a hackathon for fellows to work together on a collaborative project. A hackathon is a design sprint-like event in which individuals come together to solve problems creatively through technology.
To get the hackathon rolling a mini pitch was conducted, there was an endless amount of ideas emerging from quality healthcare, climate change, financial inclusion, social impact and digital education. While going through these amazing ideas I came across a pitch that addressed financial inclusion for farmers, and I knew immediately that I wanted to work on this idea. I already knew that farmers are the largest group of financially excluded people in Nigeria, and so by making finance available to them, we will go a long way in improving productivity in Agriculture.
In order to understand the challenges farmers faced in this regard, and identify strategies and solutions to tackle these challenges we used design thinking. Design thinking is an iterative process that involves five steps (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test) to arrive at an innovative solution.
EMPATHIZE
At the heart of design thinking process is empathy. This is because the best solutions come from the best insights into human behavior. In this stage my team and I directly interacted with our potential users during a process called Product Market Research. I wrote in detail about how we carried out the entire PMR process in this article. While conducting user interviews we observed that many farmers did not know about the various credit options available, some of the farmers were credit recipients but they could not get enough funds to expand their businesses, while some did not know how to go about the credit process.
DEFINE
We then unpacked our findings from customer interviews in the empathize stage. The personas below describe the challenges our customers face:
Mrs. Akpan is a computer science graduate in her 20s, she's passionate about agriculture and wants to start her poultry farm. However she is not aware of funding options available to her.
Mr. Adekoya is a middle aged vegetable farmer, who has been operating his farming business for 4 years now. He aspires to expand his business and knows the available credit options but does not know how to go about the application process.
Based on our new understanding of our customers and their challenges, we could now succinctly define the problem statement. The challenge at hand was that our potential customers needed access to credit information.
IDEATE
After brainstorming several interesting ideas, my team decided to create an SMS based service for farmers to receive credit information on their mobile phones. This solution is optimal because most rural farmers make use of feature phones that can receive SMSs. We will be working with farmers unions to onboard their members on our digital platform. Farmers in urban areas who have access to the internet can also register individually on this platform to get access to credit information.
PROTOTYPE
Time for us to take our idea out of our heads and into the world. In our case we chose to create a high fidelity prototype using a tool called Figma. The following are some of the screens that we designed:
PITCH DAY
After all of this work, our team is now ready to present to the judges. Our pitch deck is ready, you can view the entire slides here. Soon after group 6 concludes their presentation we proceed. Moby quickly talks about the problems that farmers encounter and how our solution can solve the problem by providing access to credit information in the first three slides.
I go ahead to talk about how our platform works to provide information to smallholder farmers in a way that is easy for them to digest and understand and also the advantages we have over our competitors.
In the next slides, Sope and Segun talk about how we plan to engage our potential market and the impact FarmSmart will have on farmers and the country as a whole.
And with Isiaka's closing remark its a wrap 😊.
The hackathon has been an exciting one and has taught me some of the important skills I need to work in a startup as a product manager. My key learnings are highlighted in the following bullet points:
Success in a hackathon requires grit, collaboration and the other values IFA has taught me; these skills are essential to working in a startup or as an entrepreneur.
Good solutions stem from knowledge and understanding of users challenges.
Properly define user problems and then you can build a solution for them.
Never discard any idea - "innovative concepts can often come from the most outlandish ideas".
Finally, "assume a beginners mindset in order to put aside biases and approach a design with fresh eyes".