As part of the Product Management hard skills lab at IFA, I and a team of three others in the Innovate for Africa (IFA) product management hard skills track, worked with start up client - Afya Pamoja. Afya Pamoja is small but surely growing health technology firm based in Tanzania, with a vision to improve the quality of public health care by providing the Tanzanian Government with hard data collected from Patients that would help in policy and decision making. Afya Pamoja already had permission to run a pilot in 2 months time but were yet to make crucial product decisions.
PROBLEM:
Majority of Tanzania is Rural with limited telecommunication services in these areas. There needed to be an effective way to collect high quality data from customer surveys that would be cost effective and encourage customer engagement.
PROCESS:
My team members and I met with the client weekly while doing market research on the product case to get the client's position and input on our product suggestions and deliverables included cost comparisons between a list of viable product choices, that were made based on data gotten from research and surveys run in the Tanzanian landscape where the product was to be used.
I also worked with product mentor Richi Murarka, a product manager at Amazon, who helped point to resources that would help the process.
Our team designed a product map and feature timeline as a well as a prosposed Mobile USSD mock up and all of this was presented to the client at the end of the final week.
Our Solution: A mobile USSD Survey method that could be supported by sms prompts to improve use, and the use of language translators and incentives, specifcally phone call credits and hospital credits, as well as providing survey feedback to users to get them engaged and invested in the survey process.
OUR FINAL PRESENTATION
Skills required: Research and Analytical skills, Critical thinking, Design thinking, Interpersonal skills, UI/Ux design