ProductTank Nairobi Recap: NiviOnMindYourProduct.
The meetup for product people, by product people
Date — 7th February 2019
Location — Safaricom Alpha, Lenana Rd ACS Plaza Nairobi
About ProductTank
ProductTank was founded in 2010 in London and today spans over 150 cities with over 100,000 members. It is an informal meetup that brings together the local product community in each of those cities — whether they’re Product Managers, Designers, or Developers — to share their experience and knowledge. ProductTanks are always free to attend, organized by volunteers from the local product community, and supported by our generous sponsors.
For more information about starting a local chapter in your city, visit the ProductTank website here.
On our 5th meetup, we had the amazing Nivi walk us through building products with considerations on the social, economic, political, environmental impact in mind. The main question of discussion being, what impact does your product have on users? She challenged us to think deeply about the responsibility we possess as product people. Do you understand the good and the bad that comes with your product?
About the speaker
Nivi Sharma is COO of BRCK, the onramp for frontier market internet users. Nivi has dedicated her career to digital access; for children, youth, and adults. She is passionate about the potential impact the internet can have on the economic and social development for the 800M Africans who are currently not connected.
In 2011, Nivi co-founded eLimu, the first company to digitize the Kenyan Primary School curriculum for revision and literacy. Nivi is a 2014 East Africa Acumen fellow and a 2016 fellow of the Fast Forward leadership programme.
Areas of discussion
- Does your product pose an existential threat, now or in the future?
- What are the negative goals of your product?
- The line between building customer-centric vs an ethical product
- When a product goes wrong, ask yourself could I have prevented this and is it too late to stop and fix the issues?
- The need to have a diverse team in the brainstorming room
- Building closely with users, the importance of beta testing and iterating as you go
Key takeaways
Nivi’s talk was the kind that is better attended, in person rather than retold, but we managed to compile our top learnings below.
- You can do hard things — While we all know that building products is hard, Nivi shared lessons she has learned along the way. Some things are hard to solve, solving them gives you an advantage, Some things are hard to build, building them gives you an advantage, Some things are hard to do, doing them gives you an advantage.
- Where do you start building products? — If you wanna catch fish, listen to the sound of the river. User feedback, surveys, and questionnaires are some of the ways to determine user needs and pain points. These will determine the products you build.
- Start by accepting you are doomed to get it wrong — Creating products is a continuous iteration. Feel free to ship products in beta and build closely with your users.
- Three key lessons to take home — In the three cases stated below, Nivi stressed on how to avoid feature creeps while building products. While at it, as product people, we should always think about the anti-goals when creating products. Focusing on what you want to avoid is a very powerful tool when we build products. These three, while not directly related to building digital products, were great real-life examples, with lots of learnings applicable while building products.
- Don’t wait for vultures to die — How a product developed to cure cows caused a major population collapse on vultures.
- Don’t Barbra Streisand your problems — How efforts to suppress information backfired and ended up making things worse.
- Cats and rabbits and dogs won’t bring Macquarie back — How an island faced ecosystem meltdown after conservation efforts backfired.
5. Your product is a bottomless well of surprises — Lots of ideas will change and evolve as the product develops. Nivi challenged us to work closely with users in all these stages to ensure we build products users need and love.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path; and that will make all the difference.”
– Steve Jobs [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]
This talk was short and very engaging and so was the Q&A session.
What really is the goal of ProductTank meetups?
While there are many online resources for product people, we believe that being in a room and sharing has an immense benefit too. Some of our goals are:
- Learn from experienced PMs and product teams — Feel free to suggest topics or speakers you would like us to host in our upcoming meetups
- Create a successful local startup ecosystem, in whichever small contribution we can make
- Share knowledge and discuss common problems in the field
- Stay on top of product trends, and share what we are building as product people
- Offer space to network with like-minded people
Thanks to all the product people who joined us for our 5th meetup, Nivi our speaker of the day for leading the engaging discussion, the kind team at Safaricom Alpha for sponsoring the event and Cyrus our photographer of the day.
Want to get more involved with ProductTank Nairobi? Join us here:
Twitter
Meetup
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Feedback - We love feedbackSpecial shoutout to the larger team at https://www.mindtheproduct.com/ who are very supportive in setting up and running the ProductTank local chapters.
Would you like to level up your product management skills, share experience and learn from top-notch product leaders? Grab a ticket for the upcoming and first-ever #mtpcon Singapore event in March!
We hope to see you at our next meetup tentatively on 7th March 2019.
