Need finding for a Government Services Portal
Encouraging a strong customer focus in a new Product Team
WHERE
Kigali, Rwanda
WHEN
2019
Irembo, Rwanda’s Government Services portal, enables citizens and visitors to apply for government services including Drivers Licenses, Birth Certificates, and Travel Visas.
Irembo was in-housing their product development: starting their own Engineering, Product, and Design Team, and building a new version of their application from the ground up. As a result, there was an effort to develop processes that would work for the team. I was brought in to identify areas for improvement and increase interdepartmental communication.
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Learning about the Team
When I joined Irembo the team was Operations-first. Having previously outsourced the software development, the Rwandan team had deep Operational Practices which enabled them to build strong product-briefs that could be executed by the external team. That helped me to see the opportunities for knowledge transfer between leads in Operations and new team-members in Product and Engineering.
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The new Product team, which included a Senior Product Manager (PM) who had been with Irembo for a number of years and a new Junior PM and Designer that she had hired, inherited a large set of business findings and interface challenges that were not as clearly socialized or prioritized as they could be. We wanted to ensure that the new site addressed our two core users: self-service applicants and the agents and government officials that sometimes helped citizens apply. I proposed that the new Product Team run some on-site research to embed themselves in the current sites successes and areas for growth so the team could see these customers needs before partnering more deeply to learn from Operations.
Collaborating on a Study
To develop some alignment, I had a conversation with the new Product team. We discussed what questions we had about the two key user groups and I developed the final interview guide from there. After working with Operations to recruit participants and reserve private space we scheduled the interview days.
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I paired with the junior PM on one of the interviews and with the Designer on another to get them used to conducting user interviews. The findings for each interview were documented by each of us in a spreadsheet at the end of each interview.
Empathy Building
Citizens conveyed how important it was to open the site in the local language. One participant, who used agents, did not know that they could apply without the help of an agent because the site opened in English, a language they knew but were not as comfortable with. The new team felt motivated by stories like this and committed to making adjustments to their initial designs in order to build the site in a way that put their user's needs first.
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In 2020, the new Irembo.gov was launched Kinyarwanda first with additional features inspired by our customer conversations.
