Agile and Anticipatory: Exploring How Strategic Foresight May Strengthen Product Strategy Through the Lens of the Fintech Start-Up Ecosystem in Africa.

Start-ups often define a future goal, called product vision and then take an iterative path to get there, called product strategy. While a start-up may know where it wants to go, there’s a contextual landscape evolving around a start-up that may drive, inhibit, and/or complicate its ability to iterate on its product strategy and achieve its product vision.

This research seeks to understand the current practice of product strategy at start-ups, through the lens of the fintech start-up ecosystem in Africa, and to explore how we may borrow from strategic foresight to embed more anticipatory thinking in a way that it complements current processes and thinking about the future.

The fintech start-up ecosystem in Africa has flourished in recent years and is poised for continued rapid growth. Through a combination of interviews with industry professionals and a review of existing literature, this research probes the current product strategy practice of fintech start-ups in Africa and suggests how start-ups and other interested stakeholders in the ecosystem may adopt a wider, more anticipatory view of forces of change in the surrounding ecosystem, identify possible implications and impacts of change, and integrate them into their practice of product strategy. A tool specifically adapted to this context to help start-ups integrate anticipatory thinking is offered.