is a technologist and product leader working on large-scale financial and operational systems across Africa. He is currently a Product Manager at Moniepoint, where he contributes to products that power millions of businesses through payments and financial infrastructure.<\/em><\/p>\nOver the past several years, Ibukun has worked across lending, payments, commerce, and investments business areas, building and scaling digital products in complex, high-volume environments. Before Moniepoint, he held product leadership roles at companies including Flutterwave, Sabi, and Lupiya in Zambia, where he worked on credit, payments, and investment products serving emerging markets.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nRecently, his work and thinking have expanded toward energy and infrastructure. He spends time researching, writing, and speaking about technology and the role reliable infrastructure plays in shaping economic behaviour across emerging markets.<\/em><\/p>\n\n- Explain what you do to a 5-year-old.<\/strong>
<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nImagine you have a piggy bank where you keep your money. Now, imagine there\u2019s a magical piggy bank on your parents\u2019 phone that can do really cool things like send money to grandma and save money for your birthday party. My job is to ensure that the magical piggy bank is safe, easy to understand, and does exactly what you need it to do.<\/p>\n
\n- What\u2019s one rookie mistake you made while working in product, and what did that teach you?<\/strong>
<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nIn hindsight, I focused a lot on my output as a product manager rather than pursuing business outcomes. The lesson there is for product managers to reduce their involvement in activities that drain energy without pushing the needle or making an impact on the metrics that really matter. As a product person, the priority should be to shape business outcomes while giving your customers a super experience.
<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- What\u2019s one career hack you swear by for working in product?<\/strong>
<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nLet me give two instead. One. Focus on the business, and two, principles and outcomes. When you are tasked with a problem or an objective to drive. You need to understand the objective from the standpoint of the outcome to be achieved.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To achieve it, you will need certain tools, and they fall broadly into two categories: product discovery and product delivery. Understanding the principles behind the tool you are using will help you to achieve your outcomes faster.<\/p>\n
To document specifications for a product, you could either map a Product Requirement Document (PRD), draw flows, create a service blueprint, or a combination of these artefacts, depending on the stakeholder or where you are in your discovery or delivery phase. The tools serve different needs; you need to understand the principles behind them to choose the best one and reach your outcome faster.
<\/strong>
<\/strong><\/p>\n\n- What\u2019s one thing about user behaviour in emerging markets that still surprises you?<\/strong>
<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nResilience and creativity in how people adapt technology to their realities. When you design a product, you imagine a fairly clean flow of how it should be used. But users in emerging markets often bend the system in ways you never anticipated because they are solving real problems in their day-to-day lives.<\/p>\n
For instance, a payment product might be designed for simple transfers, but merchants start using it as an informal accounting system. Or people begin routing money through multiple wallets just to manage liquidity across different networks. What you thought was a feature becomes infrastructure for behaviours you didn\u2019t originally plan for.<\/p>\n
What still surprises me is how quickly users discover these new patterns. It reminds you that once a product is in the wild, it stops being your system and starts becoming their tool. The job of a product team is to observe those behaviours early and evolve the product around them.<\/p>\n
\n- Let\u2019s talk about trust and building for a market still short on it. What one thing do operators overlook about technology and how it shapes economic behaviour?<\/strong>
<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nWhen it comes to technology and users, I have seen operators assume trust is a feature or something to be built outside of the technology. It\u2019s not. It\u2019s an outcome of reliability. When power fails, when payments are reversed, when systems lag, outside of the obvious increase in support tickets, users will start adapting by lowering their expectations, or even start looking towards competitors\u2019 products. So reliability matters a lot.<\/p>\n
However, the non-obvious part is how the reliability is then communicated to the user. And there are different factors like the language used, the timing of confirmations, and the visibility into what is happening behind the scenes. These all influence how people behave economically. I would implore operators to look beyond just building technology that works, but also building systems that make reliability visible to the user. That visibility is what ultimately drives economic trust.<\/p>\n
\n- When building fintech products for emerging markets, what is the biggest trade-off you\u2019ve had to make?<\/strong>
<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nSpeed and completeness. Working at the intersection of dispute resolution and operational excellence means, while ensuring the customer is happy by making sure they get their refund request or dispute sorted quickly, I also have to make sure the company is not out of position because I want to do it fast.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n- What\u2019s one part of Africa\u2019s fintech ecosystem that excites you, but people aren\u2019t paying enough attention to right now?<\/strong>
<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nI will say Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS). PAPSS is an infrastructure designed to facilitate intra-African transactions. Before this time, sending money between two African countries often involved gymnastics, like converting to a base currency, then converting from that currency to the currency of the recipient country. That whole process makes it expensive, and it takes time.<\/p>\n
The idea that we can now send instantly between two African countries, settled almost instantly, is an exciting one for me.<\/p>\n
\n- You\u2019ve recently expanded your work into energy and infrastructure. How do you see reliable infrastructure shaping economic behaviour in emerging markets, and what\u2019s one misconception people have about its impact?<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Energy is a fundamental substrate in how we live. If it is not constant or is low, it starts affecting the choices to be made. This is even more apparent in emerging markets. For instance, a 24-hour economic window means trading and commercial activities never stop, but you can\u2019t have that if power is not constant. The impact in that sense is subtle, but when you look at it commercially, it is huge.<\/p>\n
Infrastructural reliability will ultimately lead to a better-designed society where the living experience of the average human in that society is not shaped by the gaps.<\/p>\n
One big misconception is that we can\u2019t have it better or it will take a while, but I understand how hard it is to live within a dysfunctional system and be tasked with imagining or willing to live the entire opposite of the system. As long as it doesn\u2019t break the laws of physics and is commercially viable, it won\u2019t take us long to plug the gaps.<\/p>\n
\n- If you could go back and advise your younger self starting in fintech, what\u2019s the one thing you\u2019d say?<\/strong>
<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\nGet into operations early. Sit with the settlements team, watch reconciliations happen, and understand where money gets stuck. Most product managers (PMs) think operations is someone else\u2019s problem: finance\u2019s problem, engineering\u2019s problem. But in fintech, operations is where your product promise either comes true or falls apart.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve learned this the hard way. You design a great feature that promises instant payments, but say you didn\u2019t understand that bank settlement happens in batches. So users see \u201cSent successfully,\u201d but their recipient doesn\u2019t get the money until the next day. Your product just lied to them, not because the code was wrong, but because you didn\u2019t understand the rails and communicated that clearly to the user.<\/p>\n
Operations people know where the system actually breaks, where the manual workarounds are, and where competitors struggle. That intelligence should inform your product strategy from the beginning.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Emmanuel Nwosu Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ibukun Adedeji is a technologist and product leader working on large-scale financial and operational systems across Africa. He is currently a Product Manager at Moniepoint, where he contributes to products that power millions of businesses through payments and financial infrastructure. Over the past several years, Ibukun has worked across lending, payments, commerce, and investments business<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":901872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[149149,24321],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-901871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ibukun","category-quick"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/901872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}