Younglings at Barclays Aliens

For the iXperience internship, I will be working as a product manager for Barclays Aliens, the development focused, more start-upy arm of Barclays Africa Group Limited that works on moonshots - innovative projects that will launch the company forward and keep it competitive in the 21st century. Joining me are 3 consultants, Katherine, Leah, and Eric, 1 UX designer, Liza, and 1 web-dev coder, Phil. We are all being supervised by Alwyn Van Wyk, a Barclays veteran who started Aliens a few years ago.

We received a brief last week about the project, but it was basically just a list of buzz words like 4th Industrial Revolution, Financial Inclusion, and Youth Employment Pipelines, so it was helpful to meet with Alwyn Monday morning and hear his description or what he is working on and needs our help with and ask follow-up questions. After discussing the projects and our backgrounds and interests, we split up into teams to tackle each of the 3 projects. The consultants will be working on the Financial Inclusion project, researching ways to bring banking and savings accounts to more people in South Africa; the UX and web-dev designers will be working on the 4th Industrial Revolution project, designing the blog that a group of Barclays employees know as Rising Eagles will be posting to; finally, I will be working on the Youth Employment Pipeline project, designing and beginning to implement changes to the Younglings program that seeks to recruit teenagers interested in technology, particularly those outside of the formal education system, teach them how to code, and set them up with a job from which they can launch their career as a software engineer.

I spent this last week mostly researching the current state of the Younglings program, brainstorming areas for expansion and improvement, and planning my steps over the next month. I used several of the tools from the product management class including a Kanban board to organize my tasks and collaborate with the rest of the team (which Alwyn was really impressed with), a Business Model Canvas, User Personas, and a Balsamiq mockup of a Younglings website. My main goals for the project over the next month are to establish relationships and partnerships with boot camps and job placement companies around Cape Town from which to source students, develop a strong social media campaign to spread the word about Younglings to the world (I guess this is a start!), and find innovative companies around Cape Town that would be willing and eager to hire graduates of the Younglings program.

The more I learn about the Younglings project, the more I like it. It's an interesting but challenging product to manage, with a lot of moving parts and partners, but it could have a huge positive social impact if executed correctly, and I am honored to have the opportunity to have a hand in that execution.