Senior / Staff Product Designer · Dubai, UAE
I'm Tomiwa. I build products for people who can't afford mistakes.
I've spent 10+ years designing where ambiguity has a cost: asking a stranger to fund a farm they will never visit, moving money while rates and bank settlement can change, getting learning content onto devices when the internet disappears, and keeping one order coherent from payment through kitchen, stock and dispatch. I follow those problems from research into the interaction, the system rules and, increasingly, the software that ships.
I started in brand and visual design. Then product. Then I kept following the work into growth, revenue and technology because the screen kept turning out to be only part of the problem.
18% → 60% — first-time sponsorship conversion after redesigning the mobile flow at Farmcrowdy, Nigeria's first digital agriculture crowdfunding platform.
$2.1M+ processed — Mular, a stablecoin-to-Naira payments product I co-founded and design for diaspora senders and small businesses.
15,402 paid orders / 14 venues / first 15 weeks — the operational platform I design as Head of Product & Technology at Lion Hospitality Partners.
Now building:
ApplyOS — automated job-search and scoring engine.
Fleetpass — production fleet-document compliance.
Client builds — OUI Life / Stratfortis / Kalvia, where strategy and design are taken into working acquisition systems.
- 18% → 60%first-time sponsorship conversion after redesigning the mobile flow at Farmcrowdy, Nigeria's first digital agriculture crowdfunding platform.
- $2.1M+ processedMular, a stablecoin-to-Naira payments product I co-founded and design for diaspora senders and small businesses.
- 15,402 paid orders / 14 venues / first 15 weeksthe operational platform I design as Head of Product & Technology at Lion Hospitality Partners.
- ApplyOS — automated job-search and scoring engine.
- Fleetpass — production fleet-document compliance.
- Client builds — OUI Life / Stratfortis / Kalvia, where strategy and design are taken into working acquisition systems.
Four problems worth reading about.
The interesting bit is rarely the final screen.
MularWhere exactly is my money?People moving stablecoins into Naira should not need to understand blockchain to know the rate, fee, transaction state and recovery path.
Learning EqualityWhat happens when the internet disappears halfway through?Teachers and administrators needed to find, preview and import learning content where a bad connection could make failure expensive to repeat.
FarmcrowdyWould you put your money into a farm you’ve never seen?Farm sponsorship was an unfamiliar proposition asking people for real money. The design problem started with making it understandable enough to trust.
Earlybean · Techstars ’23Who gets to control a child’s money?A savings product for children became a financial system shared by parents, children, schools and merchants. Once that happened, “the user” stopped being useful.
Lion Hospitality PartnersThe customer journey ends in a kitchen.Connecting order intake, payment, kitchen production, stock and dispatch across a hospitality group where software has to survive live service.
RIIID LabsPrediction is useless until a teacher knows what to do next.Turning classroom prediction data into intervention choices teachers can understand and act on.More product work
Two shorter examples of the same instinct: follow the work past the screen.
I keep ending up in the same kinds of problems.
Money
People become excellent interface critics when the missing state is explaining where their money went. Mular, Earlybean and Farmcrowdy taught me different versions of the same lesson: clarity has a different weight when the user is moving money, waiting for money or deciding whether they trust you with it in the first place.
Bad internet
A surprising amount of product design begins with an invisible requirement: the internet is there. Kolibri doesn't get that luxury. When connections disappear, states, recovery, progress and local storage stop being implementation details. They become the experience.
People and permissions
The word “user” starts falling apart once several people can touch the same thing. A parent can approve. A child can spend. A school can request. A merchant can receive. An administrator can reverse something everyone else thought was finished. That is usually where the interesting work begins.
Operations
Eventually the beautiful customer journey reaches a kitchen, field agent, support queue, warehouse, WhatsApp message or spreadsheet. I like that part more than I probably should. It is often where the interface finally reveals the problem everybody else has been living with for months.
Where I've done it.
Writing & speaking
I write when a product problem starts looking suspiciously like a social, cultural or infrastructure problem. Sometimes I also write about football.
The library
I read enough that keeping a public shelf became easier than pretending I remember where I first encountered every idea lodged in my head.
The Prosperity Paradox
Golden Son
Outliers: The Story of Success
Stories of Your Life and OthersOutside work
I write about design, technology, culture, football and whatever social behaviour has caught my attention. I read systems thinking, history, philosophy, business and a shit load of spy fiction. I cycle, run, play football, watch documentaries and occasionally disappear into football games on my console.
I tend to follow curiosity until it becomes an essay, a product, a side project or a question I cannot leave alone.
Get in touch
If you’re hiring, building something difficult or think there’s an interesting conversation to have, write.