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Learning, growing and adapting: Mastering skills with a splash of fun

By Raine St.Claire

Shabnam Osman is the Director, Product Operations for Yoco and leads a team who collaboratively deliver innovative and scalable solutions for small businesses in Africa. She is passionate about keeping the customer at the core of everything she does, all the way from idea to launch and beyond. Her role as a Product Director at Yoco is all about enabling the Product Group to deliver business and customer value as best they can.

In an interview with Shabnam, we explore her passion for building products and teams. Her unwavering commitment is evident as she reflects on the enriching 17-year journey of learning, adding to her toolkit, making mistakes, improving and having fun while doing so. 

“We have a team of amazing product managers, designers, researchers, programme managers and product operations specialists, and I design and drive how we operate as a group, so everyone can do their best work and we all get the best results.”

This includes driving operating rhythm, designing how decisions are made, and managing how to set and track goals. 

“Within Product Operations, we also support our teams with toolkits, customer and market insights, and internal data to inform those decisions, and we guide them on how to use these tools in their work.”

A large part of Shabnam’s role is making sure that the work of the product group is connected and aligned with the rest of the organisation, ensuring everyone has the right level of visibility and engagement with the roadmap and decisions. 

“Ultimately I’m making sure that the right decisions get made, that they are made quickly, and that they are socialised and acted on as a group, so we achieve our product visions and can effectively deliver business and customer value.”

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Customer-centric focus

At Yoco, customers are at the centre of every decision they make, every step of the way.  

“The company values direct, intentional customer engagement and all members of the company’s product group regularly engage directly with customers. This means that interactions are deep and meaningful and always have an objective, whether it is exploratory interviews to understand needs, testing early ideas, or gathering feedback on existing products. All these insights come back to the teams via video recordings, photos, and quotes.”

Within Product Operations, Yoco are focused on making it effortless to engage with their customers; this may be helping with recruitment, creating interview guides, or doing a warm-up call if someone is not comfortable doing it themselves.

“We also make sure to give everyone in our product and technology teams exposure to our customers; we’ve set up tools and processes to share insights internally and provide access to actual conversations to anyone interested.” 

The company has many data points with their customers –– calls, interviews, surveys, support queries –– to ensure that these are organised and accessible to their teams.

Starting from scratch and scaling something great

“I’ve had the wonderful challenge of working with the founders to scale their ‘secret sauce’ into a product development process and product culture unique to Yoco, that replicates and scales what made Yoco great at the start.”

Over her six year period  at Yoco, Shabnam explains that she had the opportunity to launch new products from scratch, for example, an online payments product suite, which resulted in not only new products being launched but also a shift to the business operating model to become a multi-product company. She trained multiple teams at Yoco and incubated others till they were ready to stand on their own.

“As for scale, one of the reasons I remain at Yoco (besides the people!) is because this journey of scale, and designing for it, is so rewarding.”

A 17-year journey: Professional growth and lessons learnt.

Shabnam reveals a few defining moments in her 17-year career that have shaped her work philosophy and definition of success. One crucial lesson was presenting an 18-month product strategy within her first senior role, where she learned the value of bringing her unique self to work. Another pivotal moment was experiencing imposter syndrome in her first startup role, teaching her the importance of feedback and sharing work early.

The third and last lesson is about prioritisation and focus. 

“In my earlier years at Yoco, I had many growing responsibilities as the company scaled. I went through a few periods where I was working a lot of hours but struggled to have a meaningful impact, as I was juggling so much. I learnt to be brutal about where I spend my time and dropped many things to focus on and deliver a few.”

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Fostering innovation and collaboration. 

The Yoco team is a small, passionate group with a relatively flat structure and a healthy understanding of how to build great products within the organisation.

“Our product managers, along with their cross-functional teams have agency in how they solve problems.

“With a culture of being close to our customers and a bias for experimentation and action, we have created the necessary guardrails and support structures to give teams space and unblock them when needed,” – Shabnam Osman.

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