PxD - Weather Advisory
My Role
As Product Manager on the pilot, I worked with a multidisciplinary team and several internal and external stakeholders to take the platform from conception to launch. I conducted research, user interviews, managed onboarding, and oversaw software development.
Process
Market Research:
Evaluated the pain points in rapid information broadcasts of weather forecasts and crop related advice to the farmers. Identified several gaps in the process including outdated data profiles of farmers, lack of transmission capabilities, lack of accessibility considerations for low-tech, uneducated farmers, lack of awareness about ongoing broadcast campaigns, and most of all lack of advisories tailored according to real-time weather forecasts, geographical boundaries, or crop types.
Product Design:
Outlined a simple, interactive web-based platform which could broadcast data-driven, tailored advisories to farmers through mediums which do not require express history with digital services. The proposed mediums were selected to be text messages (SMS) and voice calls. Designed an interactive mockup and started discussions with stakeholders and end users to understand the acceptability and to further refine the concept.
Product Development:
Initiated three parallel activities.
- Procurement of services and means which would allow us to reach out to farmers in the farthest corners of the Punjab province.
Reached out to Telenor, a major telecommunication network in Pakistan, for their broadcast API suite. Since we were working at a provincial level, we had to sit with the Telenor development team and make improvements to their APIs to support the scale we intended to operate at. We also got into touch with Microsoft’s Azure team for demonstrations of their Text to Speech services which would convert our broadcast messages into local languages including Urdu and Punjabi. With both these services in place, we went to work in integrating these into the platform.
- Building of an interactive prototype to convert written features and services into a visual package which could be shared with high level stakeholders.
- Initiation of architecture building and backend establishment of the platform.
Metrics
- 1.35 million Punjab farmers were reached through this platform.
- 34% of farmers engaged with audio calls on a frequent basis.
- Over 40 per cent farmers said that the digital advisory services were among the reasons they made changes to their farming techniques.
Takeaways
- How to engage with a low-tech audience that is not prone to make rapid changes to their operations.
- How to increase communication with all team members by optimizing the tools that are already in use like Scrum methodology, Jira, and Slack.
