Would you put your money into a farm you’ve never seen?

Farmcrowdy was already connecting urban sponsors to Nigerian farms when I joined as its first design hire in April 2017. The sponsorship model existed, but the early WordPress service still needed a product capable of handling farm discovery, financial commitments, payments, farm updates and harvest closeout.

The challenge was a long-distance transaction with a long wait. Sponsors were committing money to farms they might never visit, while the platform had to make the opportunity understandable before payment and remain credible throughout the growing cycle. I helped turn that early service into a connected product experience and later took on brand, growth and product leadership.

I spoke with farmers and retail sponsors, and spent time on farms documenting what was happening. That work helped me break a broad question about trust into practical questions the product had to answer: What farm am I backing? How much am I committing and what return is projected? What happens between sponsorship and harvest? How and when do I receive a payout?

Those questions became a way to organise the experience. The website had to explain the model. Farm listings and details had to support a decision. The sponsorship flow had to make the amount and payment clear. Updates, reporting and the portfolio had to account for the months after the transaction. The interface was only one part of the answer: the farms and people behind it needed to be visible too.

I started the broader redesign with the public website, before moving deeper into the account and sponsorship experience. The brief recorded at the time was a two-month web UX/UI refresh with the UI/UX team: make the site say what the company actually did, and give registered users somewhere to see their account, their transactions and updates from the farms they had funded.

The public page is where that starts. The old homepage asked a visitor to play a video to find out what Farmcrowdy was, and followed it with a row of illustrations carrying no words. The redesign put the proposition in the hero and used the band underneath to answer what a first-time sponsor asks before anything else: who else is doing this, and what protects the money. Separating the public proposition from the account states is what gave the deeper product work somewhere to sit.

A first-time sponsor should not need to complete a transaction to understand what they are buying. We made the farm, location, unit price, cycle length and projected return visible as part of the decision, then carried those details through sponsorship, payment and confirmation.

The first-run sequence also had a deliberate order. It introduced the benefit to farmers, then the wider food-security purpose, before the sponsor's financial return. That helped establish the context for the opportunity instead of leading with a percentage on an unfamiliar product.

I designed the mobile experience across farm discovery, farm details, sponsorship selection, payment and the account states around them. A unit-based commitment and profit simulation made the relationship between number of units, initial investment and projected payback inspectable before proceeding.

Payment was only the beginning. After someone sponsored a farm, the product had to answer a recurring question: is anything actually happening? I designed the followed-farms and update surfaces around the farming cycle, with progress, dated updates and a route to inspect each farm in more detail.

I worked on the other side of that experience too. I visited farms, spoke with farmers, shot and edited photography and video, and helped bring that material back to sponsors through the product and its communication channels. Those field updates gave substance to a tracking interface that would otherwise have been little more than a progress bar.

The implementation details mattered. On the followed-farms view, for example, expanding one farm's update had to reveal useful content without breaking the surrounding list. I used screen-level interaction specifications to communicate triggers, expanded states and the way content should reflow.

The member dashboard brought the sponsor's position together: farms available versus farms sponsored, and expected return versus return received. Those distinctions were more useful to the customer than a decorative chart. The same account experience carried farm updates, content and invitations, giving growth features a place inside the product without losing the primary financial context.

I joined as UI/UX Designer in April 2017, became Head of Digital Marketing & Design in July, and moved into Head of Products and Program Management in January 2020. I continued working directly on interfaces while the responsibility expanded to product direction, design delivery, brand, marketing and the people doing the work.

The design system grew to more than 300 components, supporting reuse across product and brand work. I worked with designers, developers, content, analytics, marketing and PR colleagues to make the sponsorship experience consistent across the screens people used and the communication around them. The work was collaborative, including designers John Williams and Adeyemi Adedapo and colleagues such as Chibuzo Anazodo.

As Farmcrowdy expanded, I built and led brand and marketing work across the website, social channels, press, campaigns and events, alongside product and design. I hired and managed multidisciplinary teams across design, front-end, analytics, performance marketing, marketing and PR. The work moved beyond a single sponsorship flow into a larger product and commercial operation.

I led product and content direction for Agricsquare, the company's agricultural content and community platform. In 2020 I led the new Program Development Unit, working on product definition, partnerships and programme structure for Farmcrowdy Foods, Grainpoint and HAPI Insurance. Those initiatives were different kinds of solutions, with different audiences and operating demands, even though they grew from the same wider business.

During the broader product and growth period, tracked sponsorship volume grew from $1.86 million to $9.14 million and the business acquired more than 45,000 customers. By the end of 2019, company reporting listed over 25,000 farmers and 56,285 subscriptions. Farmcrowdy also received a GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator Innovation Fund grant in February 2018. These figures describe the business's scale alongside my work; the mobile conversion result is the more direct measure of the sponsorship product experience.

The important design decision was to make an unfamiliar commitment understandable at every stage. A sponsor needed to recognise what the farm was, see the amount and projected return, understand the cycle, hear what was happening while waiting, and know where the payout would arrive. Trust had to survive the whole journey.

That principle travelled with me as I moved from designing screens into building teams, communication systems and new products. Good product work needed the interface, the operations behind it and the explanation around it to agree.