I DEVELOPED MY FIRST PRODUCT!

I started a journey of transitioning into product management 3 months ago and the journey has been a combination of amazing experiences, learning, unlearning, relearning, sleepless nights and success stories, hitting milestones fast, and other times having to start all over again because there was a mistake someone and I had to get everything perfectly done.

I joined a community of like-minded witted women and we built something beautiful.

THE TRUEVEST APP

My team and I discovered that because there are so many dishonest real estate agents, millennials and low-income earners do not have access to legitimate real estate properties. We also learned that the high rate at which these properties are sold is so disheartening, and because they are unable to make payments in instalments, they end up not buying any property at all, even though they would like to.

We built a real estate app to help millennials and low-income earners invest in real estate with as little as $1, allowing them to buy, hold, and sell genuine and legitimate properties after understanding their pain points.

This software aims to give users a secure investing platform where they feel comfortable making investments while also making real estate accessible to low-income earners.

Did I mention my team members to you? We are a group of like-minded women who all benefited from HerTechTrail, some of them were product designers and the bulk were product managers. Hertechtrail is a foundation that aims to give African women the technical skills they need to succeed in the tech industry while also linking them with appropriate job opportunities. The beauty of Hertechtrail is that in addition to having a community of incredible women from other tracks, we also have access to incredible coaches who are always on hand to offer support and provide answers, even on days without lectures.

We used the Figma tool extensively throughout a series of brainstorming meetings that spanned around three weeks and each lasted for approximately two to three hours as we laid out every aspect of the app we are developing. We each came up with suggestions during the initial brainstorming session's ideation phase to help alleviate the users’ problems.

We all drew low-fidelity ideas on what features should be in the app that will best appeal to our users. The product designers then created mid-fidelity designs to show us the app’s features and user flow. The product managers, including myself, conducted another session to discuss which features should be prioritized to be of the utmost importance to users when the app is launched. The design team received a report following this session, and using the data they had access to, they were able to create a high-quality design that was approved by the coaches (stakeholders) and released on the launch date.

Along with improving our capacity to work together, creating this solution allowed us to put the backlog prioritization lessons we learned during product development into practice. Getting a handle on the prioritization techniques and how they apply to each product at each stage of development has helped extended my perspective on how to prioritize or choose product features that will help consumers in the future (after release) as they use the app.

Attached below is a link to Figma, which gives you an idea of how the programme functions.

Please give it a look, and I would welcome any feedback.

https://bit.ly/3E6J5EY

TOOLS:

Jira

Slack

Confluence

Google Meet

Google Docs

Figma

Balsamiq