Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

Agriculture is the backbone of Africa and in my country Kenya it provides more than 51% of its  GDP. This is quite impressive. Unfortunately, the Farmers behind this impressive number still  live in poverty conditions. This is because lack information on where to get market for their  products, they lack information on market prices they must depend on exploitative middlemen  who take advantage of their ignorance. There is also a long distribution chain that dilutes their  revenue.

I am a founder of an online platform that links small scale farmers to buyers using mobile and  web technology. My challenge is to create a simple technology that can be easily accessed by  farmers considering that most of the farmers live in the rural areas with little access to internet  services. This project includes IT personnel and the marketing team together with our partners  from Bora farmer’s Sacco. The project is a start-up therefore run by volunteer time. The time  line for this project should run for at most 3 months to give our software development team  ample time to create a prototype of the technology. Our partners from Bora farmer’s Sacco will  help us in structuring the first prototype of the technology so us to test it with our main users.  Once we come up with the prototype our marketing team will help us in our first go-to-market  research.

Selection

As a team, we have decided to use the learning launch tool. We believe this will help us design  a simple yet effective technology that our users can easily navigate. Working with some farmers from the Bora farmer’s Sacco we have gone through several design thinking activities to come  up with a go-to-market prototype. Doing this activity has helped us in selecting the learning  launch tool for our challenge. This tool will help us go through an iterating process that will  improve on our solution. Working with the prototype will help us experiment the idea with a  larger group of farmers.

Application

Our first launch we focused on providing a mobile application that runs on a smartphone, with  incredible features like image capture, chat and location. This is to ensure we capture quality  information about farm products farmers would like to sell. Our focus was to observe how  farmers interact with the mobile platform. This process helped us understand our market, many  farmers liked the idea behind the technology, however, most of them did not own a smartphone  and they had limited or no internet services due to their rural geographical locations. Most  farmers owned the simple feature phone that runs on Symbian operating system.  After a  lengthy observation on the farmers we realized we should have focused on human centered  design instead of product centered design. We spent the next 3 days with both our marketing  and IT teams together with the farmers to improve on the technology to run on a feature phone.  We worked through all possible solutions and we settled on creating a USSD platform.

Our second launch was to release the new platform to a group of farmers to see how they will  interact with it. Our focus was to observe to see if there were any gaps. Through this process it  helped us understand our market and what our users considered simple. After testing the

second platform we conducted interviews with the farmers who interacted with it to understand  their experiences and to find out if this second prototype was easy to navigate. Our priority was  to ensure that the farmers could use the platform with ease.

Insight

By applying the learning tool, we designed and tested our solutions. Through the learning  process we got to improve our mobile application to meet user’s expectation. It is through this  process we realized that the farmers were more comfortable with the second mobile application. Our marketing department used the results of this process to re-strategize our marketing  campaign. Moving forward our business will focus on human centered design to improve our  product and services.

Approach

The learning launch is the appropriate tool for our business.  We need as a team to review the  insight gained from our first two launches and incorporate this insight into future launch designs  as this is the most effective and ideal way of approaching and implementing solutions. Future  launch designs should reflect insight gained, progress made, and come closer to a compelling  solution ready for full rollout.

