Unleashing Africa’s Tech Talent: Lessons Learned in 2016
When i founded Tunga in mid 2015, it was born of the necessity of creating jobs for African youth with coding skills and connecting them to international software projects. The journey has been promising and here are our experiences as we continue to explore the affluent talent.
1. There are lots of skilled software developers on the African continent
When we started building Tunga, our first worry was whether we could find programmers with the required coding skills to serve international clients. Through our first pilots, we quickly found them. Our next step was finding out whether there are enough of them.
Our first impression was worrying. When in Nairobi, it appeared that the market was tight. People we were talking to asked relatively high fees and our first experience with the coders we could find there were less than impressive.
But then came Andela which launched in Kenya last April. In Nigeria they already showed the enormous potential of African coders. In Kenya, Andela got an impressive more than 1.000 applicants in the first week only. At the same time we built a considerable community of programmers in Uganda without too much effort.
It turned out that there were plenty of good quality coders on the African continent!
But the thing is that having coding skills is one thing and knowing how to put them to work for international clients is a totally different one. If you’re based in Kampala it might be relatively easy to learn yourself how to code, but not how to manage a tech project in a western business environment. This requires skills in task management, planning and communication.
And that’s where Tunga comes in. We provide an infrastructure to bridge that gap through screening, selection, training, monitoring and a host of feedback loops built into our platform. Which brings us to the next lesson.
2. Quality is even more important than we thought
The situations where our pilot clients were most dissatisfied were almost all related to communication. When their expectations weren’t properly managed. When they were left in the dark about the status of the project. When the developer couldn’t be reached at the moment he had missed a deadline or a logging requirement.
We set out with the idea that Tunga was going to be an open platform, accessible for anyone to join. This lesson really made us pivot on this issue. We realized that we cannot afford a single negative experience on our platform, and therefore have made quality our first and foremost priority.
This has resulted in a host of measures — some of them still being implemented — to ensure quality and have robust systems in place. Starting by screening new developers, organizing masterclasses to close skill gaps, introducing strict progress logging requirements, introducing a buddy system (working under the guidance of a buddy) and implementing an ‘early warning’ and troubleshooting system.
3. Working with remote workers actually works
At Tunga we decided to ‘eat our own dog food’. Our team is fully distributed over 4 cities in 3 countries on 2 continents (Africa & Europe). We regularly work with freelancers, who also work remotely.
We use all the usual suspects in terms of collaboration tools: Bitbucket for code, Slack for team communication and Trello for scrum. We have a sprint meeting every week through Skype or Hangouts. We are fully connected, working intensively together everyday, communicating with each other all the time. We even do daily standups using a Slack tool called Geekbot.
The advantage of this is of course that it also learns us to understand the situation our clients are. By putting ourselves in their situation, we know from our own experience what problems they can run into and what are potential solutions.
In summary, altogether it was a very dynamic and exciting year for us, in which we learnt major lessons that are core to our business. And that we are constantly trying to assimilate and turn into functionality. Next blog I will tell you more about our plans for the coming year.
