In recent years the Fintech industry has exploded with many product managers delving into this fast-growing sector. However, what would it be like to pack up all of your things and land a Fintech job in a completely new continent? On this week’s podcast, we spoke with. Makera Kigarada, Principal Product Manager at Fintech start-up M-KOPA to hear about how he got started in the new market as a product manager, and his key lessons learned so far.
Featured Links: Follow Makera on LinkedIn and Twitter | M-KOPA | TechCrunch piece on African Fintech growth | Economist feature on mobile phone boom in Africa
Episode transcript
Randy Silver:
Hey Lily, what’s the collective noun for a bunch of product people? Oh, I
Lily Smith:
didn’t know, Randy. But I came up with a discovery of product managers the other day.
Randy Silver:
Oh, I like that one. But I think it was years ago, might have even been the first one, the product conference, Martin Erickson in the crowd decided that the right collective noun was a compromise of product managers.
Lily Smith:
Oh, yeah, that’s quite appropriate. But it’s also kind of sad. I think I prefer for it to be a discovery.
Randy Silver:
No, I mean, compromise is not why I got into this line of work. And it’s certainly not what keeps me doing it.
Lily Smith:
Yeah, I’m definitely more into the discovery side than and the learning and not the compromising. As people who work with me know. But anyway, I won’t get into that. And why do you still do this job, then?
Randy Silver:
I really like a job where I can be a generalist and learn new things all the time and never really be sure exactly what I’m going to be learning about.
Lily Smith:
That definitely works for me too. And I think I know what’s on your mind.
Randy Silver:
You might know me a little too well. Today’s guest is MACURA keygrabber. He and I actually worked together for a while before he left me to go off and become the principal product manager for an African FinTech called M COPA. And when we’ve gotten a chance to talk, he shared some really incredible things, some incredible learnings with me.
Lily Smith:
And he’s here today to share them with everyone else. So let’s get to the chat. The product experience is brought to you by mind the product.
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Randy Silver:
McKerrow, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you, how’s it going?
Makera Kigaraba:
Hey, Randy, Haley. It’s great. Summer’s almost here. So super excited.
Randy Silver:
So we actually worked together for a while. So I knew your background, but for everybody else. Can you just give a quick little intro? How did you get into product in the first place? And what do you up to these days?
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, sure. No worries. So yeah, my name is McKarrick Europe. I’ve been in product now for probably about 10 plus years. So I can show my age. Like a lot of pm that they got into product really by accident. I originally wanted to be a wealth manager, slash commodity trader when being a finance broker was all the rage back into the swing. And I got into product, really, with my first job at uni, joined from a Graduate Programme was working for a company called Reuters or Thomson Reuters at the time. And they had you go through kind of three different rotations. And the last rotation was a junior product manager role for a product called what is wealth manager. And as the name implies, was a web based product for all things wealth management. And really that’s how I got stuck in and loved it ever since.
Randy Silver:
So we work together, doing some payments related work in the entertainment industry. But you’ve moved on since then you so you’re in a new role. Now. You’re leading a product team at a company called M COPPA. Correct. Am I pronouncing it right?
Makera Kigaraba:
No, that’s correct. So yeah, I work as a principal pm for an Cova where my team’s function is to essentially deliver digital financial services. So think kind of like insurances or cash loans. And what COPPA does as a as a company is we enabled underbanked customers in Africa get a wide range of products without collateral or guarantor. So the way we do that is we combine micro payments with Internet of Things technology to make the financing more accessible. And then in nutshell, if you want people will get a let’s say like a phone one, one of our products is a mobile phone, a smartphone, they’ll get the phone, put a deposit down maybe between 10 to $20 Depending on the phone model, and then they will make whether it’s daily micro payments or they can do it like on the laptop bought a couple one time and then at the end of six months or 12 months, they own that that product. So it’s really a packed ownership for for a lot of have customers in, in Africa. So Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, and we’re going to be launching into a new market soon.
Lily Smith:
So, McKerrow, you’ve now started working on products in very different markets to previously, how did you learn about the African market when you first started with them? Cobra?
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, no. So I’ve always been interested, and applying my skills within that free market, I think, you know, probably from, you know, early in my career, I identified the need or the desire to work in African market. So I’ve always been somebody that I’ve been following, I’ve been following the startup scene in Africa. So in copper was like one of the companies that was on my radar. But some of the things that that are different at an Copa, from a FinTech perspective, or product perspective, in comparison to where I’ve previously worked, has really been around the kind of three areas that I can think of is access accessing the customers, thinking about customers and their difficulties from a price sensitivity perspective. And then probably, you know, when you think of the Africans sphere, the diversity of people, a lot of people don’t necessarily always think this, but Africa is a very diverse base, I think this is like 54 countries, 1000s of languages. And so you have to take that mindset when delivering products in these markets, because it’s not as homogeneous, as you know, even I would have thought initially.
Lily Smith:
So how, how did you learn about each of the different markets in terms of their attitudes and stuff? Was it a lot of learning from the company, like when you joined, like a research team? Or? Or have you kind of embedded yourself in each of those different markets as well, to really sort of get that understanding? Because I’m, I’m curious, when you when you start somewhere new, there’s always so much to so much information to onboard. So it’s always interesting to see like how other people try and assimilate that information.
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, no, I think there’s there’s a, there’s a multitude of factors that helped me onboard. Quickly. Randy might chuckle here. But one of the things that I love about improv, and I think every company should do is they have really good just understanding of the market, like a lot of research a lot documentation for the different markets that we operate in. And as I mentioned earlier, as you know, we’re in Kenya, we’re in Uganda, Nigeria, and Ghana, those all very different places. So just from the get go, when I started, there was a lot of research that I could dig myself into, and better understand our pain points industry in those different areas. But then equally as important. I also did a lot of personal research, from our competitors perspective, looking at different apps, understanding our customer as much as I could, before going on, on locale, and really speaking to the end users. So with this type of product, it’s really important to have empathy for the customer. Because I am African, I’m from Tanzania. But we are very different in our lives. And our experiences are very different. So you do need to embed in and build that empathy for what the customer is facing on a day to day basis to be able to properly respond to their needs, and once so that I think those are the kinds of three combinations that I leveraged of what the product or what the company had, sorry, in terms of research, my own kind of intuitiveness. And then also, probably the last one being the you know, the more strongly weighted is in market research. And I got to spend a couple of weeks out in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.
Randy Silver:
Macquarie one of the things we talked about prior to our chat tonight, is you had mentioned in your trip to Africa, a huge disparity between some of the locations between incredibly dense urban populations really well developed, and then some other spaces outside the cities that had almost surprising technology, in some ways in real challenges. I’m wondering how did that affect your ability to do research? What kinds of things did you have to brush up on or changing your approach to doing it outside the urban centres?
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, so I think I’ll, you know, when I visited Kenya, one of the things that surprised me the most, again, was their kind of 4g connection. It’s, you know, it’s it’s super powerful. I think something like Kenya has but 90 90% of like 3g connectivity across the board. And in Nairobi, the 4g connection is what I would say probably on par, if not better than what I’ve experienced here in the UK. So testing and validating things remotely, so I’m based in London, with those sort of densely urban areas is relatively straightforward. You know, we use apps like maize, get in contact with customers and the links, have them go through different flows, a B, test those flows. And that’s really straightforward. But we do have a, and I think a lot of African startups will have customers in less urban areas. So whether and this could be maybe as much as 20 kilometres on the outskirts of Nairobi, where you really need to go in it on the locale, and start speaking to the customer and start showing them the flow is really to understand the pain points. And so for me, the things that even brush up was sort of remove some of the biases that I had already, two or three years of kind of interacting with different user personas of So folks, namely based in the US and the UK, to sort of change my mindset and have empathy for these customers, who maybe might be using a smartphone for the first time. And so those are some of the things that need to be brushed off was really around empathy, and then around putting yourself in their, in their likelihood to focus
Lily Smith:
on that. Does that also cause issues with like QA or testing as well? In terms of like understanding, or kind of ensuring that the products work for more different networks? I don’t know if this is a really stupid question. But I imagine there’s like so many different levels of connectivity, and also devices that are available, then you have to if you want to make sure that you’re designing for everyone, you really have to kind of QA all of those different varieties as well.
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, um, so the good thing is copas, I’m based in London, but our headquarters are in Kenya, we have offices in Uganda, we have offices in Ghana, Nigeria, so predominantly, probably about 80% of our our employees are based in market. And, you know, when it comes to testing, so you’re right, when it comes to testing, we do have to test for it in the in the case of phones, we’d have to test for Android phones, and Nokia phones, but the in market teams have that expertise to be able to test against that we have easy access to those those customers. So you know, if it’s, you know, customers within our office, within this kind of the urban areas in Nairobi, or in Kampala, our QA teams, our designers can easily have access to them. But everything else is still very much the kind of QA testing that you would expect here, whether it’s on the front end, other back end, that part doesn’t change very much, it’s more really around when you need to have the customer go through a flow is when it can be a little bit trickier. Because you do need to go and look the location to for them to actually interpret for you to interact with them. And understand how they use your products. Really.
Randy Silver:
One of the things you’ve talked to me about in the past is not just the urban rural divide, or the richer and poor divide, but other types of divides different types of customer segments that you might not have dealt with before, things specifically, you’ve talked about the credit invisible, you’ve talked about the the way that men and women potentially even bank, what did you learn about them? And how did you approach that?
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, no. So I think the the thing that fascinated me the most was, I had dealt previously with what is considered credit invisible. I mean, even here in the UK, on Europe, one states, they are individual who are quote unquote, invisible, invisible from the financial institutions, you make maybe in the, in the maybe the UK context, someone doesn’t have a credit score, because they may be they are a newly immigrated individual. So we don’t have a credit scoring them. And they’re called credit invisible. So similarly, in the in the African context in whether it’s Kenya Uganda, you would have an individual who a financial institution might not be ready or willing to provide them with a loan so that they can improve their livelihood, whether it’s a loan to buy a car or for their farming and whatnot. And so, the interesting for me was a the combination of how, you know, companies like the Coppa can make these people visible essentially. And so by allowing them to purchase something using micro payments on credit and to build up a quote unquote, credit score, which we could share with our partners should be watching.
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Lily Smith:
Get tickets now at mine the product.com. So with regulation in Africa, I’m not really sure how regulated it is having come from like myself, I’ve worked in insurance, which is fairly regulated, and it’s there to protect the individual. So how like how what what is the regulation like? And how do you ensure if the regulation isn’t that strict? That you are protecting the individuals and like you say you’re kind of making individuals more visible through the data that you’re able to process about that person. But then I guess you’re also taking on a certain amount of responsibility for ensuring that information is used in a ethical way.
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, no. So I think in this the scope of digital lending, which is kind of one area that football operates under, we’re starting to see much, much more regulation come into effect. So I’m binding with my foreign not an expert in regulations. But you know, some of the regulations that I’ve seen come into into effect are coming into effect, in Kenya, for example, really are they’re just to better service the customer. So it’s great to see, first of all, so it’s stuff like making sure that customers understand the interest rate APR, making sure that there is the appropriate KYC documentation that’s gathered. So all this stuff is at the end of the day will provide the customer better experience, I think across the board, if you look at Africa, across the board, I would expect, you know, when it comes to our countries like Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa are leading, the others will soon follow. So I think when it comes to regulation, I’ve been pleasantly surprised that countries are our understanding that they need to protect their citizens, and putting put in effect the regulation that’s required. So that’s a great thing, in terms of the way I approach things is, you know, I think we irrespective of the geography you’re operating in, I’ve always taken the approach of building things best in class building things that aren’t spamming, which is something that you know, you really want to avoid. And so for, even prior to regulation, or in the markets, where the regulation is not so strict, we always take the approach where by we’re there to service the customer and make sure we protect their privacy, their identities, and ultimately, their money or any money that we’ll handle.
Randy Silver:
So you’ve got some other challenges that are maybe more technical in scope as well. We’ve talked about the fact that people may not keep their data on, for example, and things like that. What kind of challenges do you have in building? What’s the difference in approach would be when you when bandwidth might be limited? Or data might be limited? For some people?
Makera Kigaraba:
Oh, yeah. Um, so yeah, I think that was one of the things going into this role. I think we talked a little bit about removing biases. So you know, myself coming into it, I thought, Oh, well, I’m surely I can’t be biassed, because I’m Tanzania. And I understand this customer, I understand their problems. You know, having lived in Tanzania going back to Tanzania. I thought I would be I wouldn’t necessarily come in with viruses. But I think one of the things that I did learn is, you know, we always need to kind of ensure or crossbreeds just double check and, and make sure that we don’t our biases don’t bleed in. So from a kind of data connectivity perspective, one of the things that and it does suck Next up is now customers, for example, will, because their price sensitive, they might turn off data notifications or push notifications, because they just don’t want it to consume their data. I think the price of one GBP has drastically reduced over the last couple of years in Africa with kind of like the fibre optic cables being laid down. But it’s still relatively expensive, I think there’s a price is like one GBP could be up to 10% of someone’s monthly wage. So you know, that could be as equivalent of like one Netflix show costing 10% of your if your monthly wage. So So those are some of the challenges that we’ve observed from a product perspective is how you get your information across to a customer. If they’re turning off their push notifications, you know, obviously, you can go through the SMS route. But you know, the customer experience isn’t as good as push notifications. So some of the things that you know, whether it’s up or the company’s do is you might decide to sponsor data so that, you know, the push notifications that happen within the app, the customer doesn’t pay, but they still get, you know, critical information through their phone,
Randy Silver:
or their fundamental differences in the user experience. Are you changing the way you work with the dev team in terms of how heavy the pages are? and things of that? Or is it purely about the notifications?
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, so I wouldn’t say it’s changed the way I work with the development team, have the interesting thing with were working out in Popeyes, I’ve, my dev team is based literally all over the world. So developers in Uganda, Nigeria, UK, Ukraine. So that hasn’t changed in terms of how we do how we deliver products. But to your point around simplicity, to your point around the user flows, I think that’s where there’s been a slight shift. Just because of the persona, that customer type, we tend to see much better conversions, much better user experience, when we try and keep the flows very simple, very clean. We also, I think localization is key in these markets. So like, for example, in Kenya, localise it this way, we are even in Uganda, to Swahili. And also, one of the things that we’re testing out is more use of imagery to explain certain concepts that, you know, maybe here is a little bit more familiar to someone, but over there might be something that they’re less familiar with. So for example, if you need to KYC someone, you know, how do you explain the fact that, you know, as a, as a regulated company, we need to gather certain pieces of information to you, in order for us to provide you these, you know, set services. So those are some of the differences there.
Lily Smith:
And I think you said earlier around, you know, the differences in the kind of education levels of just like understanding certain financial terms across the board. How do you kind of like cater for that within the design? Because you’ve obviously probably got some people who are just really comfortable and familiar with all of that terminology. And then others who, you know, this is the first time they’re coming across those terms?
Makera Kigaraba:
No, that’s yeah, no, I think, you know, understanding a PRS is always difficult for anyone who are in the world. So yeah, no, I don’t think that change, challenges change. But I think what we have been doing, and I think that’s what’s going to show showing promise is what I mentioned around, making things a little bit more visual. So if you’re trying to explain to someone, let’s say, for example, you’re paying X amount now, and you have taken on let’s say, a new, a new loan, or you’ve taken on a new product, and so your daily amount will increase, you know, I could, I could, I could, you know, I could write that in copy. But if I can visually show it, someone or I can use some sort of animation, that for our customer type is easier for them to comprehend. And that’s something that’s quite key for us is ensuring that the customer knows what they’re signing up to, which comes a little bit into terms of like, making sure that customers don’t get over indebted. So by really making it clear what they’re signing up to. And so by visually showing things, that’s quite of a helpful way of doing it. But at the same time, I think there’s also something to be said around, you know, our customers are also very aware of price points because they’re price sensitive. And so you know, some of the standard frameworks around you know, putting things in FAQs. is still very prevalent. So maybe you don’t have to have it, you know, all over the customer journey. But you can definitely link out to somewhere where they can get more information to better understand before this before signing up for something.
Lily Smith:
And is there anything you’ve learned in your kind of early time and copper, working in this new kind of space? And with these new markets that you think, Oh, I’ll definitely use that if I started another business. Any sort of, like key takeaways from, you know, working in in a very different business?
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, no. So I think there, there’s, there’s definitely a lot of learnings, things that have, I would have carried forward to me in whatever other role that I have, I think the number one would really be around. And it sounds cliche, but customer empathy. I think a lot of times, if you’re operating in a market, if you’re building a b2c product, in a market that you’re familiar with, you can lean in a little bit on your own experiences. So for example, I used to be a product manager for a digital bank, here in the UK, called monies. And so a lot of the flows, a lot of the problems that we were trying to solve for were things that either myself, colleagues, friends and family had experienced, or the wider community, which I was living in, was experiencing. So I think while there are some biases, there is no, we’re not all alike. You can lean in on that experience. However, I think, in a market where it’s very different to how you’re living, where you live, I think that what’s key and what’s important is to really dig deep in the customer empathy and understand why people are doing things, the way they’re doing things. So for example, you know, like, what I mentioned around people turning off their data, because they don’t want to receive push notifications. I mean, to me, that might seem as you know, why would why would why would never do that. But it makes perfect sense. In that context. People don’t need any unnecessary downloads. So another issue that I think a lot of African fintechs, or a lot of African startups might have is, you know, the ability to continuously update their, their apps, again, because customers see, are conscious about using data, they might read more or less regularly update their apps. And so the ability to modify things quickly gets impacted. So whether you have a different patch, or different release, like it’s impacted. So I think digging deep understanding the customer, and then finding a solution that works for them in their context is super key. And I think, you know, that carries weight, whether it’s you’re building stuff for the African context, the Asian context, or the American context, wherever you are in the world. So
Randy Silver:
speaking of different contexts, you said earlier, there’s hundreds, if not 1000s, of different languages to potentially deal with, you’re dealing with a bunch of different countries with different contexts. And you’re trying to balance this with the challenge of not overloading the app and what you’re trying to do. So how do you prioritise or how do you make a decision about when to do localization? And how do you balance that those two competing things?
Makera Kigaraba:
Yeah, so just yeah, that’s, I think it’s a challenge, definitely, for sure. I think for top of my head, Africa has 54 countries, and I think somewhere between 1500 2000 languages, so and those are official languages, which I think in comparison to Europe, it’s close to 300 languages, and I won’t make an attempt of how many countries, but I think you can start to see that. They, you know, you have to sort of pick and choose what you’re going to localise and it doesn’t make sense to localise everything. So the good thing is in East Africa, for example, there is Swahili or Qi Suevi, which covers Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, is spoken some in Wanda. So you can kind of you know, that’s that’s a no brainer, right? There’s like, if you have the keys waiting, you can cover a wide range of countries in that sense, on top of thing, which I think we’re, you know, decisions have to be made is when you look at a country like Uganda, and they might be you know, 100 200 languages there. And one language that say like Luganda is spoken predominantly in the capital Kampala. So the question is, like, do you translate it but if you’re true Translating into ganda, you might only be translating for folks in the Capitol, but you’re not servicing everyone else. And so I think as you sort of have to make decisions based on data and based on your customer time. So, you know, in this context, if we were servicing 80% of our customers in Kampala, in Uganda, that may be translating to Luganda makes sense. But I think, when we look at right now, products or apps being built in Africa, predominantly, they’re going to be in English. Or maybe like in the East African case that I’ve seen, they’re going to be translated Kiswahili. I’ve seen very few apps translated into some of the more some of the other languages. But I would hope, and I suspect that, you know, in order to access more and more people and get more and more people to understand your app, and what you’re looking to do, we’re gonna have to make moves into into that space and making sure that we’re recreating any local apps that people get understand.
Randy Silver:
That makes sense. Mac, this has been fantastic. I could ask you questions about working in markets that I’m not used to that I don’t have experience with all day long. And it’s really interesting to hear about your experiences in it. Unfortunately, though, we don’t have all day we have run out of time. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Unknown:
Thank you very much for having me on here. And a pleasure. Thank you.
Lily Smith:
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you
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