Community Talks: Alice Dufeu

Alice Dufeu leads strategic projects for a fintech startup called Taptap Send — whose mission is to simplify and lower the cost of remittance for diasporas around the world. After graduating with an MA from Johns Hopkins’ SAIS, Alice spent four-and-a-half years working at ReD Associates as a consultant, senior consultant and project manager.

What drove you to join TapTap Send and tell us a bit more about the company?

Sure, it’s a company that allows diaspora communities around the world, but mainly from Africa, to send money home to their families and loved ones at a very low cost in the most convenient way. The big and exciting purpose of driving down the costs of sending money home is what drove me to join but also the idea and understanding that it will be serving a diversity of communities, from Malians to Kenyans to Moroccans and others. What excited me was the challenge of serving these communities in their own unique ways but at scale.

That's super cool. What about in terms of your past experience with ethnography, do you think that played a part in your role at TapTapSend?

That challenge I knew would require ethnographic research to get to know these communities, to deliver the kind of product they needed and strategy to penetrate and grow within these communities. You could argue that all companies need ethnography but this company especially. Also, it felt like a pure application of anthropology in a way. Lots of different groups, and people’s own ways of communicating what they value. You’d have to figure that out.

How did your time at ReD influence your current role and approach to business and strategy?

In a few different ways. First thing is making sure that the user-perspective is in strategic conversations and informs decisions  we make at the company. Although my role is not purely a research role – I use research and conversations with users to inform the decisions I have to make from what countries we should launch next, to who we should partner with on the ground. I always want to make sure that we have users in mind for every decision we make.

Second, one of my first steps when I joined was working to empower teams to do their own research using different methods through quick teach-ins–  e.g. conducting hour-long phone interviews with prospective users or launching quick surveys for our users. As part of that exercise, having teams pause and think critically about what they want to get out of that research before approaching every piece is something I took from my time at ReD and the emphasis on framing. And before rushing in, making sure all the objectives are clearly laid out and you are using the right methods for it, and understanding that there are other exercises or methods you can use besides just asking people questions that will get you to what you want to know (and beyond!).

What about specific skills?

A lot of people I know from ReD moved to UX [roles], which is a more one-to-one transition. My role is more of a partnership and go-to market focused role. It took me a little more time to understand the specific skills I was leveraging from my ReD times. The main one – I would say -- is sensemaking in a broad sense. As you figure out which new markets to launch in and how to do it. This is sensemaking in its purest form. You have to identify stakeholders that matter in that market, have open conversations with them .You‘ll speak to various experts, users, regulators etc. to get a different perspectives on a market and try to make sense of it. Then you condense those data points into a take on what you need to do to win in that market. The ability to be comfortable with chaos was something I took from ReD – dealing with ambiguity and then managing not only to make sense of it, but also identify a pattern or distill a point of view to bring value to the company.

What’s an example?

Well, take Haiti, which is a country that has a lot of different methods for receiving money – bank account, in cash, or on a mobile phone. And basically, through doing research and having multiple conversations with different people, you realize that these specific methods reveal a lot about one’s socioeconomic status or the situation on the ground and how its changing. For example, sending money to bank accounts could seem like the safest, but actually its actually associated with wealth and in the crisis that Haiti finds itself in the moment with low levels of security, going to the bank is dangerous because you’re seen as a target for kidnapping. Then there’s cash pickup, which is the most used method, but you’ll encounter very long queues and also expose yourself. Finally, there’s mobile wallets that are used by lower middle classes for small national peer to peer transfers but that will soon be available to receive international transfers due to a change in regulation. Doing the research, speaking to experts and relevant stakeholders on the ground gets you to those things and help you make a decision.

Also, most useful in the startup context is the mindset of testing and iterating. It’s a practice that is core to how ReD approaches innovation and it’s how you approach it at startups too – you test new product concepts and new ideas in general with users, get feedback, improve and re-test. You want to be able to take an insight, an idea and then build a very low-tech version of it, get it in front of users, get feedback, then go back to drawing board.

Do you have any eye-opening experiences from the field you can share?

It’s so hard to choose because there are so many! One particularly interesting finding I remember was the realization of the role that other people around a person – a central user we were investigating – play in the adoption of a product or a service. That was something that really surprised me and is really hard to get to if you’re not doing in-person observation. We did a project for LEGO across different markets – we went to China, US, and Europe. Seeing kids with parents who grew up with LEGOS versus kids whose parents didn’t grow up with it had such different experiences and how they progressed in their LEGO-building ambition and ability. Parents who grew up with LEGO would know how to  guide their kids in the right way and unlock that full potential of the bricks – which was fascinating while others would stick to instructions and struggle more. I also saw this in healthcare, when we spent time with people with overactive bladders. Just seeing the role of their loved ones and caregivers played in the awareness phase – noticing that they had symptoms -- and in assessing the impact of their treatments, was eye-opening. These projects showed how people around you impact how you use or interact with a product and can be as important to target from a company’s perspective. In my context, with the adoption of our app, it definitely applies as well. For example, we see a lot of older folks who have their younger family members help get them through onboarding – and help them overcome the tech barriers.

How did participant observation benefit you outside of consulting?

I personally believe what set us apart from the competition -- in the company I work in now -- is the extreme thoroughness with which we approach new country and product launches. One of the ways we make sure we are is through practicing participant observation as part of our decision process. For example, we’ll go to the receiving country, and spend time with people who are receiving money. We’ll find ourselves in very long queues where it’s very hot. Or realize it’s a Sunday and everything is closed – even the shops where you’d normally pick-up your money. I mean, I think it goes without saying but experiencing what users have to go through gives us a very relevant lens that inform product decisions.