Last month I attended a product leadership workshop in Nairobi, Kenya by Christian Idiodi – one of the most successful product leaders of our generation and a role model for the African tech community.

The Christian Idiodi story

Hailing from a small rural community in Nigeria, Idiodi worked his way through attaining a scholarship to attend University in the US, only to drop out of medical school and then win a million dollars to run his own tech business. In the past 15 years, Idiodi has turned ideas into solutions that have shaped companies such as CareerBuilder and Merrill Corporation, Microsoft, Starbucks (he helped set up the franchise in India) and Squarespace.

Now a partner at the Silicon Valley Group, Idiodi runs Innovate Africa Foundation, a nonprofit designed to equip Africa's entrepreneurial and innovation community with education and development resources. With new shifts in the African tech industry, the mentorship of individuals like Idiodi is crucial for tech leadership in the continent.

The unique African tech landscape

There has been a surge in Venture capital funding in Africa from $40Mn in 2012 to +$5Bn in 2022. Over the past few years, homegrown tech companies like the Mara Group and LifeBank, founded by young Africans, have become multi-million dollar businesses.

While the African tech scene is seeing a tremendous growth spurt, its entrepreneurs and innovators are also facing challenges like skill gaps, access to global networks, poor infrastructure caused by power outages, and little internet access – only 22% of Africans have access to internet connectivity.

Most global discourses on product management tend to cater to the West, but Idiodi’s leadership gives perspectives that are equally if not more relevant for the East, whose markets and economies face unique challenges. The fundamental tenet for product management. In an episode of the Product Science Podcast, Idiodi reveals his mantra behind launching a successful product -

“The fundamental tenet of [a] really good product is that you really do not know.”

As counter-intuitive as this sounds, Idiodi encourages leaders to approach product management with humility and curiosity instead of preconceived notions about their potential customers and the market. Rightly so, for in my own career as a growth leader, I've seen many professionals, including myself make gross assumptions on what customers may want or need – without validating it through investigations and multiple tests.

There are two ways in which he suggests leaders can practice his tenet –

1. Spend time with customers to build solutions NOT ideas

“Talking to customers and understanding the nuances of their problems is key”

During the initial stage of product development, Idiodi’s roadmap begins with having “spent time talking to customers, spent time learning from people in the business, spent time engaging with the people that will create this product”.

He believes that the process of getting to know the people behind the product ecosystem is the only way that allows leaders to build products as solutions. That will then further compel people to switch their behavior, adopt the solution, and ultimately pay for it.

Idiodi admits that in his long and diverse career the “streak of failure” came when he was “making assumptions from a conference room…” and did not spend time with his customers when building products.

So leave the office building, ditch the countless team calls to get on the ground, and have some real conversations with your customers.

Here are 5 questions you can ask your customers when building a product

• Problem: What is the definition of the problem in the words of the user?
• Persona: Who has the problem that your product aims to solve?
• Alternatives: What are the alternative ways of solving this problem if our product did not exist?
• Why: What is the core reason or motivation the user chooses to use our product to solve their problem?
• Frequency & Retention: How often does the user experience this problem?

These questions were a resource in my Reforge Slack community group.

2. Experiment, learn and fail forward

“How quickly you can go through experiments, how quickly you can go through testing, how quickly you can gather evidence, how quickly you can validate and learn what actually will work is really part of the secret sauce of what makes good products.”

This approach of Idiodi asks leaders to practice the fundamental tenet in a way that accepts not knowing what works for their products until they “experiment, try things and learn”.

According to research, 30,000 new products are introduced every year, and 95% of them fail because “there’s no market for the solutions they’ve created.” Organizations whose products fail often “lack empathy” and “do not take the necessary time to study and understand the customers’ true needs.”

That is why the best way to know how your product will perform is to put it out in the market and test it, and test it and then test it again.

Humility, curiosity, and fearlessness build great products

Personally, for me, the heart of Idiodi’s product philosophy lies in being people-centric and fearless.

This means building products with curiosity about the people you’re building them for, having humility towards the challenges of their lives, and asking them how they’d like to overcome them.

After product leaders have gained authentic knowledge about their customers, it’s time to release the fear of failure and put your product out on the market. Product learning only comes through trial and error.

Failing forward is the mindset of successful product leaders.

This article was first published here.