Before you build a Pan African Product: A PM’s perspective

Photo by James Wiseman on Unsplash

In my last post I wrote about what I considered to be a make or break factor to the success of a pan-African/multinational product. A pan-African product is a product that is available in more than one African country. A product becomes pan African or multinational in one of two ways:

• A product has established itself in a market and is looking to expand to other markets or
• A product is simultaneously launched across different markets.

Most of my experience has been in the latter — launching a product simultaneously across different markets and I believe the considerations to be made are typical considerations to be made in product development, just on a much larger scale.

Product management sits in the intersection of business, engineering, marketing and across almost all facets of the business. In this post, I highlight what I think are the critical steps to be taken (from a product perspective) in the early days of building a pan-African product.

1. Do your user research. Confirm the user need / problem you’re trying to solve is the same/similar in the markets you want to launch your product in. For example, starting out at Shara we started out validating the state of informal credit in the markets we had in mind, noting the similarities and differences. True to several studies that had being done, it was clear that the need for credit is universal, so building a credit product across countries made sense. The deliver however had to be market specific.Refer to the last post.
   In the early days, I and my counterpart in Kenya were out in the markets every other day, speaking with customers. Our goal was to understand how their businesses operated, their mindset around informal credit and their thoughts on what we considered potential answers to their needs. The frequency reduced and the format changed over time but we ensured we spoke to users every week.
2. Determine your channel. Channel here is the means by which you deliver the solution. It can be web, mobile, USSD or a mix. Your audience and the nature of your product determines the channel. There’s a general rule that one builds mobile first for the African market. While this is typically true for B2C products, one should always evaluate as rules have exceptions. For example, if you’re building a B2B product (say, a data aggregation tool for an FMCG company) that requires a lot of dashboards for decision making, going a web first approach might be the best way to go.
3. Identify the partners / 3rd party integrations you’ll require in each market and the technologies they support. Check out the partners you’ll need to deliver the product in the market of choice such as the payment processor, etc., and in your consideration, factor in the technologies they support. For instance, when building a mobile app, you’ll want to check the frameworks they support — native, Flutter, React Native and others. We went with React Native as most of our partners had support for it than other frameworks. Also, React Native allowed us build for both Android and iOS in record time.
4. Prototype, test your hypothesis: This goes without saying… before building the product, test your hypothesis, preferably with a prototype. It can be a connected screen of designs or something a bit more sophisticated but make sure to test your hypothesis. This goes hand in hand with doing user research.
5. Above all, develop your Go to Market strategy for the markets in question. Putting this together will give you a lot of clarity around the what, who, why and how of the product and improve your chances of success. If a Go to Market strategy looks too massive at such an early stage, start out with a business model. I remember the entire team working with the business model canvas a few months into product discovery and it created so much clarity as to how we built the product and navigated the Nigerian and Kenyan market.
   It is important to note that because a strategy was successful in country A doesn’t mean it will be successful in country B. You have to tailor your strategy for each market.

These might seem basic but it is important to have a solid foundation, especially when building a product that spans multiple markets. Delivering a product across multiple markets is not a walk in the park. However, having the right building blocks makes for a smoother experience. Any specific considerations to be made will emerge from the considerations above, especially after user research is properly done.

Do you have any experience with building a product across different markets? Please share your experiences in the comments below. I’m also happy to answer any questions you may have.