How to grow a digital (farmer’s) community from scratch?
TL;DR This article talks about how we became very efficient mainly because the vision and the mission were clear and how we are selective in bringing in people so that we are set up for success.
It’s been a little over 5 months since I join the team in Yara — Crops & Digital Incubation as a product lead. This is probably one of the craziest moves I did over my career lifetime since Yara is not a tech company and definitely not known for product organization. For me, coming from big tech companies like Spotify, Klarna and Agoda, I had big doubts about how a traditional fertilizer company will understand the tech world. But at the same time, I was mesmerized by the company vision: “a world without hunger”. I was inspired to make the world a better place. So, I set out to conquer this challenge. This is basically my brain dump over the past 4 months. First off, the vision:
Yara Vision: A collaborative society; a world without hunger; a planet respected.
My team was formed to enable farmers by uplifting their knowledge with worthy insights that they will trust and adopt and also empower farmers by connecting them to the network that they can rely on. Hence, our mission is
“To improve farmers livelihood with go-to-solution that empowers them to farm sustainably”
Our team started like any other tech startups. We looked at farmer’s pain points → created a hypothesis → came up with a prototype → ran a user testing → built the product. We have a healthy-looking community in over 3 months by repeating this cycle. I will be going through how each team has contributed from research to product to content and last but not least, data.
Research
Our research team is very close to the users. We do real farmer interviews, went out in the field to understand the day-to-day work, and even in COVID time, we do close user group discussion to keep in contact with them. We do have in-house digital agronomists but we also take in more best practices and knowledge from practitioner experts.
With all the interview notes and qualitative data we gathered, we came up with the hypothesis and move into testing the feature that creates value. What’s crucial in this research step is the core skills that our team has, we empathize with our farmers and we only recruit people that have a similar understanding and mindset.
Product
Our product team consists of a product owner, developers, QA, and business analysts. We run 2-week sprints with sprint planning, a sprint review, and a retrospective. In each sprint, we try to run hypothesis testing to validate the value before adding to the product backlog. This gives us a good sense of why and how should we place a feature solution to help solve the user’s pain points.
In each feature, we usually release the smallest minimal lovable product as possible so we can spend time understanding and learning. If needed, then we enhance the feature later on. If the feature doesn’t get enough love, then we stop and move on to discover new features. Basically, in some sprints, we are looking at shipping 1 first built feature and 2–3 enhanced features based on what we learn from customer feedback and data analytics.
OKRs: Objective and Key Results
We have also started using OKRs to help us focus while being very autonomous to fail fast and learn fast. Everyone on the team is able to contribute and ideate while keeping an eye on the key results.
Content
Content plays a really big role in this successful launch and user acquisition. We pre-built curated content through our experts and digital agronomists to make sure there are enough interesting posts to attract farmers. We also create “this is my community” feelings by engaging farmers into helping others in need. This plays into one of our two goals; empowerment.
Our philosophy is content as a product.
We value our content as much as other features in the app. Curation and social listening are done proactively every day. AI and machine learnings will play an important role in the upcoming features since we will need to closely monitor our user-generated content 24/7 to make sure that we are generating value for our farmers.
In addition, the fact that we are in Agriculture, online knowledge sharing hasn’t been a practice within the farmer’s community. Therefore, there are a lot of good insights and tips&tricks are within a smaller group of people. Since we identified this, we are accumulating that through our experts’ network and slowly release them to our users to consume. As well as the IoT that other Yara team is working on, we will be able to integrate and create even more useful and advanced content in the future.
Data
We must admit that we were late in setting up the data infrastructure so quantitative data didn’t play such a big role in the MVP phase. However, we have now set up most of the self-serving data platform where anyone (even non-technical) on the team can dig deeper into their own data. We are putting emphasis on the build-measure-learn framework and any requests without data (could be both quantitative and qualitative) to back-up will not get prioritized.
In a nutshell, we connect all of our data to AWS Redshift where we host our data warehouse. At the same time, we also connect our mobile app to Segment SDK to be able to track all events and send to all marketing analytics, Amplitude, and our Redshift for analysis and machine learning purposes. All raw data in the data warehouse are consolidated to create a persistent layer which then leads to a curated layer where users are consuming. This means any data analytics will not be disturbing our production performance while keeping things clean and insightful.
In Summary..
I’m super proud of my team, I am impressed and I know we will be achieving a much higher target in no time. Everyone plays a part in building this and making it valuable for our farmers. We built on talents, we are very selective in hiring team members. Keeping the growth mindset culture, empathizing with the farmers, and pushing on experimenting has helped us so far and will keep us going.
PS. We are hiring!
