As a Lead Product Manager, Nilesh Gaurav knows the in and out of Jiva’s platform. But sometimes you might be wondering, what does Jiva’s product actually do? And how does it work with users who live in rural areas? In this article taken from the latest #WorkWonders episode, Nilesh talks with Nea Ningtyas & Bintang Lestada, our Sr. Content Specialists about his role as Lead Product Manager and the challenges that he faced in his career in Jiva, be it socially or logistically.
As a Lead Product Manager, Nilesh Gaurav knows the in and out of Jiva’s platform. But sometimes you might be wondering, what does Jiva’s product actually do? And how does it work with users who live in rural areas? In this article taken from the latest #WorkWonders episode, Nilesh talks with Nea Ningtyas & Bintang Lestada, our Sr. Content Specialists about his role as Lead Product Manager and the challenges that he faced in his career in Jiva, be it socially or logistically.
Read the excerpt* of our #WorkWonders conversation below.
*Edited for length and clarity.
Hi, I'm Nilesh. I’m actually a computer science engineer. I started off working as a software developer in a firm called Oracle. But then to gain a more business oriented approach, I decided to go for an MBA which I completed from India. Post that, I started working in Olam as a Branch Manager, managing the coffee business in Indonesia for about four years.
I loved it, but then I was looking for a new challenge and learning experience, which led me to an upcoming digital platform that is now known as Jiva. This was back in the day when we were not called Jiva and we were still figuring out what we wanted to do. We were doing a lot of ground research, experimentation amongst a bunch of other things.
Within Jiva, I have been based out of Surabaya and then Makassar, working as Operations manager for a year and a half, building the operations and our collector network. After that, I moved into a more product focused role primarily being responsible for two main domains. One is e-commerce, where we sell agricultural inputs. The other one is the internal user tooling within Jiva.
Our input e-commerce platform is one of the main things that I work on within Jiva. E-commerce has been at the forefront of our growth for the last two years. When we started off, we built a product to give interest-free loans to a few farmers, and these loans were given in the form of [agricultural] inputs. Since then, we have also ventured into being a wholesaler of agri inputs — keeping in line with the same vision which is to provide good quality agri inputs to our farmers. The only difference is that now we do that via multiple channels: via our network of micro-collectors (MCs) and our newly-formed network of retailers along with direct farmer selling.
At first when we started about 3 years ago, we were doing a few hundred dollars of inputs in a month. Now, we can do about a million per month. So we have definitely come a long way. Ultimately, our end customers are farmers. The way we reach out to the farmer is in multiple different ways.
We try our best to sell as much as possible directly to the farmers. But then because the number of farmers is huge and the digital adoption is not where we want it to be, we also have to reach out to them by our network of retailers and collectors. And we do that with products which are the Sahabat Jiva app and the Retailer app, which we call Jiva Grosir (editor’s note: at the time of writing, Grosir has been rebranded as ‘Agro’ - from this point forward the excerpt will use the new name).
Agro is kind of an interesting idea. It started as a very small pilot where we wanted to test out whether there are takers for our retailer business model or not. We started in the areas of South Sulawesi, selling inputs through WhatsApp. If you opened the WhatsApp business, there was a jiva agri shop with a catalogue of Inputs - seeds, chemicals etc. You could create a cart and place an order with Jiva - right from Whatsapp itself.
We had huge success - the users placed orders on their phone, with a call, or by meeting our sales teams. WhatsApp was the next best thing for them because there was a minimum need for a physical touch point. Users could just just place an order and get it confirmed. It was a huge success and that drove us towards the spot where we thought “Hey, this thing might work, right?”
But at the same time, somewhere along the way, we realised that WhatsApp is not really sustainable. There are rules and regulations around using WhatsApp business and in terms of serving a user base in an holistic way, reaching out via Whatsapp can only do so much. Because of that, we pivoted to a platform that could be sustainable in the long run. That’s when we came up with this idea of Agro and we’re like, “Ah okay, let's try to build up and see how it goes.”
So we launched Jiva Agro back in March 2023. It's not been too long - only a year. We already have a huge network of retailers which looks very promising. The hope is we get to continue to grow and Agro becomes our main model of business.
I would see it as a low-tech platform. I don’t know if you have come across Facebook Lite, but [Facebook Lite] is a very toned down version of the full fledged Facebook app where it is designed for usage within areas where there’s slow internet connectivity or low spec phone usage — which is exactly the type of demography that we work for.
We have always strived towards building a platform that is very, very low tech and easy to understand. We are not just a digital platform but we now also provide physical touch points to our customers because of the current ecosystem. It’s low tech plus an operational reach to our customers.
While doing my MBA, I was working with an e-commerce brand for a very brief period. Even when I was working with Olam Indonesia, I was tasked with launching an e-commerce platform called Olam Professional. We wanted to launch our wholesale products portfolio for HoReCa segments (like cashews, corn, coffee powder, and so on) through that platform.
There was a lot of thought process that went behind building products in those stints. But the low tech that we are building now for Indonesia is absolutely different. One of the things is that you were working with a very different demographic where there is very low Internet penetration. The smartphone availability is also on the lower side. Basically, you do not have a lot of options.
For example, if I wanted to introduce a digital payment solution in my product, I would have to jump through a lot of hoops and even then I might not succeed because the regular infrastructure that is required to run it is not there.
All of that requires working with a bunch of technical and adoption related challenges that are unique to our current work.
The positive of working in Jiva and also in Indonesia is that on a daily basis, you get so many challenges and you solve problems that you probably have not anticipated and sometimes even have not heard of.
Starting off with the biggest challenge, which is tech literacy in Indonesia. The problems that you face because of that, is how do you make the users use the app? How do you make them understand the value of the product? How do you manage distribution of the new features? Unless they use the app, they won't really understand the value.
Secondly, whoever has the smartphones — the low spec smartphones — usually has very low storage space. Which is why as a platform, we are kind of fighting for real estate on their [farmers’] phones with apps like Facebook, WhatsApp. Why would a farmer or a retailer want to install your app in lieu of those apps? And on top of that, when you are releasing updates, it just makes distribution of the apps much more difficult because every time there is an update, the retailer would think, ‘Should I believe this app or should I install this update before we do any updates?’
Specifically for Indonesia, and true for a lot of countries in Southeast Asia, there’s a lot of contextual difference between one region to another. For example, the southern part of South Sulawesi speaks a completely different language compared to the central parts of South Sulawesi. Jeneponto has a different language compared to Bone. Jeneponto even has a different language compared to Banteng [the next district].
There’s an anecdote with some learning to explain this. We used to call our agricultural inputs as Saprodi because that’s the literal Bahasa translation. While we were doing some user research, we were talking to farmers about Saprodi, but nobody really understood what Saprodi meant. (Again, Saprodi is the literal translation in Bahasa of agricultural input). Basically they just call it bibit (seeds) and racun (chemicals).They also call every input as ‘barang’. I mean, this is quite a challenge as well.
There's a lack of — for a better word — a digital ecosystem in rural Indonesia. I talked earlier about the lack of digital payments. The Internet cost is relatively higher as compared to other countries in Southeast Asia. You also do not have a reliable service that can do door to door delivery. So we have to develop products that work either without these supplementary services, or we also develop infrastructure that goes along with the product. Luckily, we have worked with local companies like Telkomsel to provide free vouchers or give Internet coupons to some of our users just to be able to use that app.
And lastly, every business is about building relationships. In rural areas, everything is relationships. Nobody is going to trust you, because you are an outsider and you started coming to their place and claiming that you will improve their livelihoods. That's not a selling point for them. They will trust only if you build a real relationship on the ground.
Those are some of the challenges that we face. We have built a lot of solutions and a lot of innovations have been done by our teams to overcome some of these solutions, but yet still a lot of work is in progress.
Important point and really, really important for us, because the challenge on our hands is that the two transactions that we do on our apps, are inputs and offtakes. Both of these are complex transactions with multiple business models. And these are the transactions that our users actually depend on for their daily livelihoods. So how do you make these as simple as possible and ensure that they get complete transparency and information that they require?
The other thing is, how do you make an app faster with a low internet connection? For me, the key to this is two-folds. Firstly, to have a very, very minimal app, an app that just lets the user complete their transactions & understand the information that is presented to them with complete transparency. And along with that, we use design cues that are less of text and more of images to be as interactive as possible.
That is the first key. The second is along with the product, operationally, you have to be as innovative as possible. An example of how we achieved this is via product and operations. For the farming community, one of the most important things is getting the agri inputs during their planting season reliably and timely. They're waiting for the rain to start planting so you need to deliver the seed on time so that they don't miss that small window.
While I was working in South Sulawesi, obviously we had no way of routing or delivering sufficiently so that our delivery would always take about 5 to 7 days to reach our farmers. We wanted to reduce that gap so that farmers can reliably get all their orders. So we started running through some scenarios and ideas. Ultimately, we landed on an idea where we rented a few trucks and we started doing milk runs by ourselves to deliver orders. That way, we were able to optimize the delivery period and reduced our fulfilment costs due to better efficiency as compared to a regular delivery model. We had 0% returns and cancellations as compared to before, which was 2%.
Now another example is, when we realised that the retailers are in the habit of working on phone calls and they will not really use our apps. So we started giving them WhatsApp nudges. We started creating WhatsApp catalogues so that they can order seeds directly with us.
And then there are a bunch of other products that I'm really proud of that my colleagues are building, both on product and operational side. Some of them are setting up the infrastructure for digital payments, a comprehensive pricing solution and many others.
Now on our app, users can complete online bank transfers. We have a crop doctor feature where users can take a photo of a plant and we can diagnose and suggest chemicals as solutions. All of these are really gamechangers for the farmers.
Another thing that is just super important for excelling in the rural demographic, is a way to ensure that there is some form of hand-holding when the user is just starting on the app. To that extent we have a very comprehensive training program with a suite of digital and offline solutions including the Jiva Academy app, which is a platform where users can learn how to use the app and get started on their own. The idea is not to let the users feel that there is no support for them with an app that is overwhelming with options. And that's the trick here, that we give them some form of hand-holding and then we have a quick feedback loop to understand what are the needs and wants, and what's working and not working in the product.
That’s important overall, because when we think about it, maybe we can do a transaction on Tokopedia for a useful item - but that’s because we are much more tech savvy and we probably trust these platforms with their T&Cs, return and refund policies and so on.
But now compare that to a farmer who has never done an online transaction, and is now being asked to be dependent on a digital solution for their livelihood. That's the bridge that they have to overcome and we have to extend our hand in whatever way we can to help them across.
Thank you so much.
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What do Customer Experience do in order to make sure their customers’ complains are heard and their needs met? And what would one do when communication itself becomes the issue of delivering these concerns? In this article taken from the latest #WorkWonders episode, Aina talks with Bintang Lestada, our Sr. Content Specialist about her role as Customer Experience Lead.
Being the Senior Service Designer, Karan Patel intends to discover how Jiva can deliver the best experiences for its users, be it from Jiva or other people. So many charts and journeys are created and innovated to serve the users. In this case, service blueprinting is the way to go. In this article taken from the latest #WorkWonders episode, Karan talks with Nea Ningtyas & Bintang Lestada, our Sr. Content Specialists about his experiences as Jiva’s Senior Service Designer in Indonesia and the process of his job.
As a Lead Product Manager, Nilesh Gaurav knows the in and out of Jiva’s platform. But sometimes you might be wondering, what does Jiva’s product actually do? And how does it work with users who live in rural areas? In this article taken from the latest #WorkWonders episode, Nilesh talks with Nea Ningtyas & Bintang Lestada, our Sr. Content Specialists about his role as Lead Product Manager and the challenges that he faced in his career in Jiva, be it socially or logistically.
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Fathia Ramadina has been in user research for years prior to joining Jiva - but there are things about rural users so distinct that uncovers rich layers of enlightening insights on doing research. In this blog post, she reflects on how she found that after doing many research projects and hundreds of interviews with Sahabat Jiva, a meaningful rural user research goes beyond techniques.
July 22, 2024
As a Lead Product Manager, Nilesh Gaurav knows the in and out of Jiva’s platform. But sometimes you might be wondering, what does Jiva’s product actually do? And how does it work with users who live in rural areas? In this article taken from the latest #WorkWonders episode, Nilesh talks with Nea Ningtyas & Bintang Lestada, our Sr. Content Specialists about his role as Lead Product Manager and the challenges that he faced in his career in Jiva, be it socially or logistically.
Read the excerpt* of our #WorkWonders conversation below.
*Edited for length and clarity.
Hi, I'm Nilesh. I’m actually a computer science engineer. I started off working as a software developer in a firm called Oracle. But then to gain a more business oriented approach, I decided to go for an MBA which I completed from India. Post that, I started working in Olam as a Branch Manager, managing the coffee business in Indonesia for about four years.
I loved it, but then I was looking for a new challenge and learning experience, which led me to an upcoming digital platform that is now known as Jiva. This was back in the day when we were not called Jiva and we were still figuring out what we wanted to do. We were doing a lot of ground research, experimentation amongst a bunch of other things.
Within Jiva, I have been based out of Surabaya and then Makassar, working as Operations manager for a year and a half, building the operations and our collector network. After that, I moved into a more product focused role primarily being responsible for two main domains. One is e-commerce, where we sell agricultural inputs. The other one is the internal user tooling within Jiva.
Our input e-commerce platform is one of the main things that I work on within Jiva. E-commerce has been at the forefront of our growth for the last two years. When we started off, we built a product to give interest-free loans to a few farmers, and these loans were given in the form of [agricultural] inputs. Since then, we have also ventured into being a wholesaler of agri inputs — keeping in line with the same vision which is to provide good quality agri inputs to our farmers. The only difference is that now we do that via multiple channels: via our network of micro-collectors (MCs) and our newly-formed network of retailers along with direct farmer selling.
At first when we started about 3 years ago, we were doing a few hundred dollars of inputs in a month. Now, we can do about a million per month. So we have definitely come a long way. Ultimately, our end customers are farmers. The way we reach out to the farmer is in multiple different ways.
We try our best to sell as much as possible directly to the farmers. But then because the number of farmers is huge and the digital adoption is not where we want it to be, we also have to reach out to them by our network of retailers and collectors. And we do that with products which are the Sahabat Jiva app and the Retailer app, which we call Jiva Grosir (editor’s note: at the time of writing, Grosir has been rebranded as ‘Agro’ - from this point forward the excerpt will use the new name).
Agro is kind of an interesting idea. It started as a very small pilot where we wanted to test out whether there are takers for our retailer business model or not. We started in the areas of South Sulawesi, selling inputs through WhatsApp. If you opened the WhatsApp business, there was a jiva agri shop with a catalogue of Inputs - seeds, chemicals etc. You could create a cart and place an order with Jiva - right from Whatsapp itself.
We had huge success - the users placed orders on their phone, with a call, or by meeting our sales teams. WhatsApp was the next best thing for them because there was a minimum need for a physical touch point. Users could just just place an order and get it confirmed. It was a huge success and that drove us towards the spot where we thought “Hey, this thing might work, right?”
But at the same time, somewhere along the way, we realised that WhatsApp is not really sustainable. There are rules and regulations around using WhatsApp business and in terms of serving a user base in an holistic way, reaching out via Whatsapp can only do so much. Because of that, we pivoted to a platform that could be sustainable in the long run. That’s when we came up with this idea of Agro and we’re like, “Ah okay, let's try to build up and see how it goes.”
So we launched Jiva Agro back in March 2023. It's not been too long - only a year. We already have a huge network of retailers which looks very promising. The hope is we get to continue to grow and Agro becomes our main model of business.
I would see it as a low-tech platform. I don’t know if you have come across Facebook Lite, but [Facebook Lite] is a very toned down version of the full fledged Facebook app where it is designed for usage within areas where there’s slow internet connectivity or low spec phone usage — which is exactly the type of demography that we work for.
We have always strived towards building a platform that is very, very low tech and easy to understand. We are not just a digital platform but we now also provide physical touch points to our customers because of the current ecosystem. It’s low tech plus an operational reach to our customers.
While doing my MBA, I was working with an e-commerce brand for a very brief period. Even when I was working with Olam Indonesia, I was tasked with launching an e-commerce platform called Olam Professional. We wanted to launch our wholesale products portfolio for HoReCa segments (like cashews, corn, coffee powder, and so on) through that platform.
There was a lot of thought process that went behind building products in those stints. But the low tech that we are building now for Indonesia is absolutely different. One of the things is that you were working with a very different demographic where there is very low Internet penetration. The smartphone availability is also on the lower side. Basically, you do not have a lot of options.
For example, if I wanted to introduce a digital payment solution in my product, I would have to jump through a lot of hoops and even then I might not succeed because the regular infrastructure that is required to run it is not there.
All of that requires working with a bunch of technical and adoption related challenges that are unique to our current work.
The positive of working in Jiva and also in Indonesia is that on a daily basis, you get so many challenges and you solve problems that you probably have not anticipated and sometimes even have not heard of.
Starting off with the biggest challenge, which is tech literacy in Indonesia. The problems that you face because of that, is how do you make the users use the app? How do you make them understand the value of the product? How do you manage distribution of the new features? Unless they use the app, they won't really understand the value.
Secondly, whoever has the smartphones — the low spec smartphones — usually has very low storage space. Which is why as a platform, we are kind of fighting for real estate on their [farmers’] phones with apps like Facebook, WhatsApp. Why would a farmer or a retailer want to install your app in lieu of those apps? And on top of that, when you are releasing updates, it just makes distribution of the apps much more difficult because every time there is an update, the retailer would think, ‘Should I believe this app or should I install this update before we do any updates?’
Specifically for Indonesia, and true for a lot of countries in Southeast Asia, there’s a lot of contextual difference between one region to another. For example, the southern part of South Sulawesi speaks a completely different language compared to the central parts of South Sulawesi. Jeneponto has a different language compared to Bone. Jeneponto even has a different language compared to Banteng [the next district].
There’s an anecdote with some learning to explain this. We used to call our agricultural inputs as Saprodi because that’s the literal Bahasa translation. While we were doing some user research, we were talking to farmers about Saprodi, but nobody really understood what Saprodi meant. (Again, Saprodi is the literal translation in Bahasa of agricultural input). Basically they just call it bibit (seeds) and racun (chemicals).They also call every input as ‘barang’. I mean, this is quite a challenge as well.
There's a lack of — for a better word — a digital ecosystem in rural Indonesia. I talked earlier about the lack of digital payments. The Internet cost is relatively higher as compared to other countries in Southeast Asia. You also do not have a reliable service that can do door to door delivery. So we have to develop products that work either without these supplementary services, or we also develop infrastructure that goes along with the product. Luckily, we have worked with local companies like Telkomsel to provide free vouchers or give Internet coupons to some of our users just to be able to use that app.
And lastly, every business is about building relationships. In rural areas, everything is relationships. Nobody is going to trust you, because you are an outsider and you started coming to their place and claiming that you will improve their livelihoods. That's not a selling point for them. They will trust only if you build a real relationship on the ground.
Those are some of the challenges that we face. We have built a lot of solutions and a lot of innovations have been done by our teams to overcome some of these solutions, but yet still a lot of work is in progress.
Important point and really, really important for us, because the challenge on our hands is that the two transactions that we do on our apps, are inputs and offtakes. Both of these are complex transactions with multiple business models. And these are the transactions that our users actually depend on for their daily livelihoods. So how do you make these as simple as possible and ensure that they get complete transparency and information that they require?
The other thing is, how do you make an app faster with a low internet connection? For me, the key to this is two-folds. Firstly, to have a very, very minimal app, an app that just lets the user complete their transactions & understand the information that is presented to them with complete transparency. And along with that, we use design cues that are less of text and more of images to be as interactive as possible.
That is the first key. The second is along with the product, operationally, you have to be as innovative as possible. An example of how we achieved this is via product and operations. For the farming community, one of the most important things is getting the agri inputs during their planting season reliably and timely. They're waiting for the rain to start planting so you need to deliver the seed on time so that they don't miss that small window.
While I was working in South Sulawesi, obviously we had no way of routing or delivering sufficiently so that our delivery would always take about 5 to 7 days to reach our farmers. We wanted to reduce that gap so that farmers can reliably get all their orders. So we started running through some scenarios and ideas. Ultimately, we landed on an idea where we rented a few trucks and we started doing milk runs by ourselves to deliver orders. That way, we were able to optimize the delivery period and reduced our fulfilment costs due to better efficiency as compared to a regular delivery model. We had 0% returns and cancellations as compared to before, which was 2%.
Now another example is, when we realised that the retailers are in the habit of working on phone calls and they will not really use our apps. So we started giving them WhatsApp nudges. We started creating WhatsApp catalogues so that they can order seeds directly with us.
And then there are a bunch of other products that I'm really proud of that my colleagues are building, both on product and operational side. Some of them are setting up the infrastructure for digital payments, a comprehensive pricing solution and many others.
Now on our app, users can complete online bank transfers. We have a crop doctor feature where users can take a photo of a plant and we can diagnose and suggest chemicals as solutions. All of these are really gamechangers for the farmers.
Another thing that is just super important for excelling in the rural demographic, is a way to ensure that there is some form of hand-holding when the user is just starting on the app. To that extent we have a very comprehensive training program with a suite of digital and offline solutions including the Jiva Academy app, which is a platform where users can learn how to use the app and get started on their own. The idea is not to let the users feel that there is no support for them with an app that is overwhelming with options. And that's the trick here, that we give them some form of hand-holding and then we have a quick feedback loop to understand what are the needs and wants, and what's working and not working in the product.
That’s important overall, because when we think about it, maybe we can do a transaction on Tokopedia for a useful item - but that’s because we are much more tech savvy and we probably trust these platforms with their T&Cs, return and refund policies and so on.
But now compare that to a farmer who has never done an online transaction, and is now being asked to be dependent on a digital solution for their livelihood. That's the bridge that they have to overcome and we have to extend our hand in whatever way we can to help them across.
Thank you so much.
