Smallholder farmers in the Shea Industry live a challenging life. From lack of economic opportunities to climate change, if they are not helped their already troubling situation will worsen. Sommalife is a social startup who strives to sustainably improve the lives of rural farmers in West Africa by helping with production, protecting lands from deforestation dn having developed a software to improve operations. Sommalife has been successful at this to a small extent and has set the stage for an impactful act in West Africa. Sommalife currently does this with their own profits as the shea supply chain does not pay for impact at the moment. Without this support Sommalife will struggle to scale and improve its impact. Existing tools to monetize impact , such as Fair Trade, do not apply to the widespreadness of Sommalife’s operations and the poverty level of the farmers as their operations have high monitoring costs.

Fortunately, the world is changing and a demand from consumers for sustainable products is affecting industries. Industries with similarities to the shea industry like the cacao industry. Sommalife has an opportunity to monetize their impact by advancing the industry and attempting to address the consumers. This can be supported by opportunities to monetize their social and environmental impact through carbon credits and a form of storytelling driven by impact data. The climate projects are supported by partnerships and will provide additional social and financial benefits to communities, while also generating carbon credits. On the social side, Sommalife can monetize its impact through data-driven storytelling. This involves turning data into tangible narratives that build consumer trust and brand loyalty for Sommalife and its partners. In return Sommalife will expect these companies to pay an impact fee.

These services are by a brand strategy and roadmap to effectively execute and communicate Sommalife’s mission to drive change in the shea industry.

The thesis addresses the organizational challenges of lacking the big pictures in an early-stage startup. First, the author joined a newborn software venture as a founding product manager and observed the dynamics in his daily practice. Then, through numerous interviews with team leaders and employees, the author analyzed the data and discovered several issues happening in this newborn company. Among the findings, the most significant one is that the leaders didn’t reach a consensus on the company’s long-term goal; and the employees didn’t have an aligned sense of the company’s mission and product vision. This phenomenon led to employees’ low productivity in new product development, constantly making incorrect trade-offs, and misaligning collaboration across different teams.

The project presented a design toolkit consisting of a canvas and an instruction brochure to overcome the challenge. This design toolkit helped the leaders collaboratively develop a big shared picture by outlining the company’s mission and product vision. The author held a design workshop to implement the solution with three company co-founders and successfully generate the organization’s long-term goal. As a result, the author evaluated the outcome by comparing employees’ behavioral changes.

Internally, an enormous leap in the team’s productivity has been identified. Employees were able to accelerate the progress of the product development by eliminating irrelevant tasks. Additionally, the collective big pictures improved the collaborations between the product team and the business development team. Finally, they could make the right trade-offs according to the company’s big pictures. Externally, the CEO utilized the well-developed company mission and product vision to stand out from other candidates while applying startup accelerators. As a result, the company impressed the recruiter and successfully entered into a startup accelerator. Moreover, two corporations also invited the company to collaborate on building the product.

In terms of customer acquisition, enhanced employee productivity helped the company get its first paid customer eight months after it was founded. These company achievements complement the outcome of the thesis by proving the importance of the company’s mission and product vision in an early-stage startup.