I design the workflows that break when trust, signal, or patience runs out.

Most products don’t fail in the happy path. They fail in the unclear state, the dropped connection, the payment someone is scared to make, the assumption nobody tested.

I learned this building for markets that punish lazy assumptions: Nigerians whose banks had already failed them, farmers sponsoring crops on one bar of signal, teachers importing lessons on a connection that drops every few minutes. You can’t design for those conditions from a comfortable mental model. You have to go find where the product breaks.

The common thread is access: who can actually use what we build, under what conditions, and what breaks first. I run this as a repeatable check, the Access Assumption Audit, across connectivity, device, language, literacy, and delivery surface.