Tammy’s Highlights from Week #4 –

Taking a moment to stop, think, and rest.

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This week was remarkably meeting and site visit free – an important time to reflect on what we are seeing and learning, and let things settle in our minds. Last weekend we went to Ethiopia to visit an old friend, who is in Addis for the summer working with a chicken farm and a PE firm based in Nairobi, looking into investments in East Africa. It was an interesting crowd we don’t encounter in Nairobi – from chicken farmers (okay, business guys focused on a traditional, but high-potential agro-business) to McKinsey PE folks to investment folks. This also exists in Nairobi, but because there is such a strong social enterprise community, it often feels like there is little need to look beyond it. The scale (both in dollar size and in actual business sizes) and different types of backgrounds were an interesting and inspiring jolt, something which we were talking about well into this week.

Some customer research context

Spring semester, I took an “Innovation in Services and Business Models” course (Professor Henry Chesbrough’s book, Open Services Innovation, covers many if not all of his course’s points). One concept of particular interest to me was the Value Proposition Canvas, introduced to the class over Skype by Alexander Osterwalder, the inventor of the business model canvas (explanation of the canvas is here). A key takeaway for me from Osterwalder’s presentation was how the success of a business model often hinged on finding a truly relevant value proposition, and often organizations and business models will fail because they don’t understand their customer, and come up with a not-so-valuable-value-proposition. The rest of the business model stuff is important too, of course. In our situation though (as is true for many), it means a lot of effort to understand our users and what would be compelling to them – and for us to really understand the customer jobs, gains, and pains. And we only have a summer to do it! At least, to be able to do this firsthand. After that, we need to have a process that lets us continue to do customer research in some way, once we return to the Bay Area.

An overview of our customer research process

It took several rounds of trial and error (discovering our survey was too long, iterating with Ciiru on expectations for survey writeups, going on several site visits as a team to match up expectations, and so forth) but we have now completed our first round of interview and write-ups. We will be repeating this when we are in Western Kenya next week. It was challenging at first, trying to strike the right balance between quantitative data collection, open-ended questions and observations, and diving into people’s current workflows, without annoying the interviewee. Ultimately the real constraint in all of this is time, for us, as well as the interviewee.

I have been driving towards 3-4 things for each stakeholders – a quantitative survey, interview summaries to highlight things from more extensive interviews / observations, and a process flow diagram to understand visually and easily what happens (and #4 to start next week: direct feedback on our mockups at the end of the interview). Interviews with the DMOH and other one-off expert opinions are still captured as unstructured interview notes.