(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, which should probably have produced a more orderly career than this. Instead I 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, but visual work never really disappeared.
I photographed extensively alongside my design career — including through and after Farmcrowdy — mostly landscapes, places, agriculture and everyday life. I still take photographs now, usually on my iPhone; I just publish far less of them.
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)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 · Co-founder at Mular
- Open to
- Senior / Staff Product Designer roles and selected product leadership work
- Résumé
- Read the résumé
What all of that changed
Working across several functions did not make me interested in doing everybody’s job.
It made me suspicious of problems that arrive already labelled.
“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?
Where the work has taken me
2022–26
Learning Equality — Senior Product Designer
2024–
Mular — Co-founder, Product Design & Growth
2017–20
Farmcrowdy — Founding Product Designer, later Head of Marketing & Product Development
2011–
Neustack Studio — Co-founder / Creative & Product Design Lead
2026–
Lion Hospitality Partners — Head of Product & Technology
Also: 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.