Bridging Capacity Gaps: Twiga Foods' Tech-Enabled Transformation
The Ask
Twiga Foods, a tech-enabled startup, aims to bridge gaps in food and market security by creating an organized platform for a more efficient, fair, transparent, and formal marketplace. As a high-growth startup, Twiga needed to quickly scale their design and development capabilities to meet the increasing demands of their operations.
Twiga approached us with a specific challenge—bridging their design and development capacity. Typically, tech companies prefer to build internal capacity, but in Kenya’s tech ecosystem, recruiting senior design and engineering talent can be a lengthy process. This approach is inefficient when there is an immediate need for resources or during cycles of fluctuating demand. Twiga needed a solution that could quickly augment their team without the delays associated with traditional recruitment.
The Observation
We stepped in to provide the necessary design and development resources, ensuring Twiga could maintain their growth momentum. Our deliverables focused on optimizing and enhancing various aspects of Twiga’s technology infrastructure.
The Process
Optimizing Data Management Systems:
- Improved the operations of Twiga Foods’ Data Management System, which manages their supply chain from harvest to the shop.
2. Disaster Recovery Mechanisms:
- Developed robust disaster recovery mechanisms to ensure Twiga’s infrastructure remained resilient and operational under any circumstances.
3. M-Commerce Platform Development:
- Built and launched their m-commerce platform, Twiga Shop, facilitating a seamless online shopping experience for users.
4. Streamlining Onboarding for Developers:
- Created a development environment that simplified the onboarding process for new developers. With a few steps, new team members could set up the entire codebase, database, and third-party services on their local machines, accelerating their integration and productivity.
Participation in Sprint Planning:
- Actively participated in sprint planning sessions, ensuring that development efforts were aligned with Twiga’s strategic goals and timelines.
6. User Testing and Field Visits:
- Conducted user testing through field visits and rollouts to gather feedback and make necessary improvements, ensuring the solutions were user-centric and effective.
The Outcome
- Twiga links farmers and vendors to fair, trusted, modern markets
- Recent fundraising round was $30m
- Leveraged our developer for hire model to augment their design & development team
- Our front end engineer took the lead during the prototyping of Soko Yetu
- Soko Yetu is a B2B ecommerce solution allowing Twiga’s customers (local shops) to put in orders and make payments
- Post pilot, development work was handed over back to the internal dev team
