The most zestful weekend of my life

 

I'm feeling very dexterous. I can't code to save my life but my most zestful week end was with a bunch of programmers. Against what most people think of this tribe, I dare to say that not all programmers are nerds. I may be wrong but my firsthand experience in a hackathon that lasted more than 48hours period was far from nerdish. It was fun all the way. I held brilliant conversations. Truth be told, I couldn't but reckon with the fact that these folks enjoyed hours of uninterrupted coding. I could see the passion in their eyes. The key pads on their machines can bear me witness. I had the awesome privilege to be part of one of the teams in the 2013 VISA Financial Literacy Challenge which took place at the CoCreation Hub. Although my team didn't win the cash prize, I salute the dedication of the noble folks I worked with. Their work ethic is simply put un-earthly. In this post, I share a few thoughts on the lessons I took away.

 

 

The Challenge

My team was saddled with the responsibility of building a mobile learning solution to serve financial management and financial product content to all economically active Nigerians. The delivery was to be via SMS and native apps. The apps were going to be free.

 

 

With the above brief, my responsibility as a member of a 7-man team (including a lady) was primarily to break down the business case. I was there as the Finance "expert" on the team. Before the session, the musketeers (a name I now call my team members) knew next to nothing about finance and financial management or so they thought. We got around the finance concept and I was able to demystify the concept to the extent that we were all able to relate it. For the benefit of reiteration, finance although nebulous is essentially about money. So for the purpose of the hackathon, I kept a N100 bill close to me to remind the team that it was all about money and that our job was to build an application where people can learn about money. This nursery approach to keeping things simple proved to be expedient to say the least.

 

 

Without much ado, here are the insights I took away from the session:
 

 

1

 



Prototype. After we had gone past the initial proof of concept trying to understand the concept, the team was well on its way to articulating the concept in form of a paper design or shall I say mock-up. In less than one hour into our meeting, we had come up with three designs/models. This phase of our project afforded us the opportunity to calibrate our concept while moving closer to making our idea happen. We sought from the very beginning to build something that will not only solve the problem at hand (financial illiteracy) but we were very particular about the chances of our soon to be built product in the market. But for the intervention of the project champion who asked us not to worry about the marketing side of things, we would have deployed the business model canvas.

 

Lesson: Avoid the temptation of boiling the ocean. Creating a prototype of what our product would look like moved us closer to reality. It helped us to focus.

 

 

2

 

Look out of the window. With the limited time on our hand, the team in spite of the nature of the challenge was very user-centric in our approach. We were not building apps for zombies. We engaged independent members of the ecosystem to proof our hypothesis. It goes without saying that every product is built on specific hypothesis.  Getting feed backs outside our tact team helped us to iterate our design. In time we had a ready-to-execute concept design. The team was well on its way to making the idea happen.

 

Lesson: Avoid the risk of building a product built on faulty hypothesis. Engaging others outside our team helped us to sweat-out and flog our assumptions. Our final design was based on insights we gathered.
 

 

3

 

Organise. I was very curious as to how we were actually going to make the idea happen. I came into the session with near zero understanding of how apps were built. I had no clue. In a very short time, our team was organised into sub-units. One unit consisted of three programmers each with specific tasks to create the wire frame design for three devices (Windows, Android and Mobile Web). A programmer was assigned with the responsibility of configuring the back-end (BE) as well as another programmer with the task of setting up the database (BD). The team lead (a strong lady with erudite experience) and I had the mandate of coming up with content. Everybody had a specific task and deliverable and for the next 48 hours would work assiduously to deliver. We outsourced the configuration of the SMS platform.

 

Lesson: The decision to outsource the design and execution of the SMS gateway was a particularly strategic one. This part of the challenge was a knotty one that needed to be managed. Our answer saved us a lot of headache. The team lead supervised the process supremely.
 

 

4

 

Put up a show. The challenge culminated into a pitch session where each team was expected to present their work before a distinguished and able panel of judges. At this stage, the work is up for critique and tearing apart. In this particular instance, things played out quite below my expectations. It did because our presentation was not rehearsed. We just showed up and managed to stage an act. The product we had was well done but on this occasion, I didn't quite put up a show. I co-led the pitch which wasn't a bang. A number of things came up as unfortunate which made my team fall off the mark.

 

Lesson: Being able to put up a show was far more crucial than having a great product. Sloppy pitches won't do the magic. This for me was the greatest lesson of the entire hackathon.