(opens in a new tab)PhotographyUnsplash
Published photographs from an ongoing personal practice.
About
I started out designing logos. Things escalated.
I'm Tomiwa. I studied Computer Science with Economics at OAU and spent university moving between code, economics, design, music and acting. Design was the thing that stuck.
I started professionally in brand and visual design. Then I wanted to know what happened after somebody saw the thing. That question took me into product.
Product eventually took me into growth because a usable product nobody wants is still a problem. Growth took me closer to revenue because acquisition becomes considerably less interesting once you have to explain what the business actually earns.
Eventually I found myself leading product and technology because software has no particular respect for the boundaries in your job description. That is roughly how the last decade happened.
Image-making & visual work
Making images has run alongside most of my design career.
Product design became the centre of my professional practice, and visual work has continued alongside it.
I photographed extensively alongside my design career — including through and after Farmcrowdy — mostly landscapes, places, agriculture and everyday life. I still take photographs, usually on my iPhone, and the older body of work remains public on Unsplash.
My older Dribbble and Behance portfolios hold another part of that history: brand identities, campaigns, illustration, interfaces and visual experiments from earlier stages of my career.
(opens in a new tab)Archives
Earlier professional work
Brand, graphic, interface and visual design from earlier stages of my professional practice.
- View Dribbble (opens in a new tab)
Dribbble
UI, iconography and visual experiments
- View Behance (opens in a new tab)
Behance
Identity, graphic design and campaigns
At a glance
- Work
- Senior product design / product & design leadership
- Based in
- Dubai, UAE
- Visa
- UAE work-authorised, own visa
- Currently
- Head of Product & Technology at Lion Hospitality Partners
- Open to
- Senior / Staff Product Designer roles and selected product leadership work
- hello@tomiwao.com
- Résumé
- Read the résumé
What all of that changed
Working across several functions taught me to question problems that arrive already labelled.
The label is often downstream of the actual problem.
“This is a UX problem” sometimes means the pricing makes no sense.
“Users don’t understand the dashboard” can mean the organisation itself has three definitions of the same number.
“Conversion is bad” can mean the customer doesn’t trust the proposition.
And occasionally the button really is just in the wrong place. I enjoy finding out which one we’re dealing with.
That has taken me through financial products, education, agriculture, AI-assisted tools, design systems and hospitality operations. The surface changes. The useful question is usually the same: What has to be true for this thing to actually work?
Right now that question is a hospitality group. I lead Product & Technology at Lion Hospitality Partners across fourteen venues. Orders arrive from counters, marketplaces, WhatsApp and direct storefronts, and the product has to keep payment, kitchen, stock and dispatch aligned while service is running. The design works when those teams share one operational truth.
The other current thread is carrying more of those decisions into working software. ApplyOS is multi-user candidate software I designed and built around market-aware discovery, eligibility-first job judgment, governed evidence and candidate-reviewed application preparation. Fleetpass is a live vehicle and driver document product where AI extraction becomes authoritative after human confirmation. AI-assisted build tools let me move from product judgment to working software much faster, which makes the quality of those decisions even more important.
Where the work has taken me
2022–26
Learning Equality — Senior Product Designer
2017–20
Farmcrowdy — Founding Product Designer; later Head of Marketing & Product Development
2024–
Mular — Co-founder, Product Design & Growth
2026–
Lion Hospitality Partners — Head of Product & Technology
Also: Neustack Studio, brand and product work across 60+ clients · Earlybean · AdPipe / SuperGIF · RIIID Labs · Venture Garden Group
A little history
I grew up in Lagos and did my NYSC year teaching in Lafia, which remains one of the hardest and most useful jobs I’ve had.
I’ve read somewhere north of a thousand books, most of them badly filed in my head. I’ve DJ’d, been in a rap group, started several businesses and have a couple of acting credits on IMDb that I did not expect would still be there.
I speak English and pidgin, plus enough German and French to be a disappointment in both.
I’ve lived in Dubai for the last few years. Lagos still appears in a lot of what I build, write about and worry over.
Outside work
I write about design, technology, infrastructure, culture, football and human behaviour. The categories are less tidy in my head than that sentence makes them sound.
I run and cycle, play football when my body agrees, take photographs, watch a lot of documentaries and periodically vanish into whatever football game I’m currently pretending not to spend too much time on.
The library is here because I read compulsively. The writing exists for roughly the same reason.