Audrey Chanakira believes the best technology begins with listening

A month after uploading BunnyNest Tracker to Apple’s App Store, Audrey Chanakira opened its dashboard expecting little more than confirmation that her brother had downloaded it.

Instead, she found strangers.

The rabbit farming app she had built in three days was attracting users in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

“I saw people downloading the application,” she recalls. “I wondered where the downloads were coming from.”

 BunnyNest Tracker was never intended to become a product. Her brother had asked her to recreate a printable PDF he had found online to help him keep track of breeding schedules and rabbit stock. 

Chanakira, a software engineer, thought software would do the job better. So she built him an iOS application in three days, uploaded it to Apple’s App Store so he could download it while he was abroad, and moved on.

 The app, created for a single rabbit farmer, quietly found users around the world.

 That unexpected success came to define Chanakira’s career.  “Most people like hype,” she says. “But for me, it’s really laying a foundation and living a legacy that matters.”

Long before software became her calling, Chanakira’s first love was football.

Growing up in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, as one of three children, she says she was a quiet child who was often bullied because she rarely spoke. Football became an escape. She played for her school’s girls’  football team throughout school, and the confidence she gained on the pitch gradually replaced the shyness that had defined much of her childhood.

“I gained popularity as I played football,” she says. “That boosted my confidence.”

Computers entered her life not through a classroom but through play. On her uncle’s computer, she spent hours…