Building products in Africa: Lessons from PMs working on the continent

The Inspire Africa Conference brought together product managers from across the continent, each dealing with different challenges whilst building technology solutions in markets that don’t align with conventional product wisdom. 

During the event, we got the opportunity to interview three product practitioners who shared with us their stories, challenges, and revealed what it means to build products in Africa today.

• Upenyu Hamudikuwanda has spent five years in product management at JoBox in South Africa, learning hard lessons about when markets demand service over technology. 
• Keena Patel returned to Kenya two years ago, joining Watu Credit where she bridges business needs and customer realities across ten countries. 
• Nana Yaw Nhyira Butah brings product experience across multiple industries at AmaliTech in Ghana, wrestling with the unique challenges of service-oriented product management.

Read on to hear their stories, challenges, and solutions in the product space.

A transition into service-led product management

Upenyu Hamudikuwanda never set out to become a product manager. Five years ago, he joined an HR tech startup as a business analyst intern. When the company decided they needed a product person, they asked if he'd be interested in trying it out. "I didn't know what product was," he said. The first book he read was Marty Cagan’s Inspired, and he's been working as a product manager ever since.

That career journey mirrors the experience of many African product managers. "You don't really even know there's such a career, and then you start to find out that, oh, there's something that you can actually just do to solve problems," he said.

At Jobox, Upenyu has lived through one of the most challenging transitions a product company can face: transitioning into a service-first product. Doing so taught Upenyu valuable lessons about what customers actually want versus what product teams think they should want.

The discovery problem

When asked about the biggest challenge he is facing in product today, Upenyu identifies two fundamental issues. The first is what he calls "a bias to discovery." In many African companies, product managers aren't really doing product management. "A lot of the time ,as product managers, we’ve just been given a solution, and then we are told to do product. A lot of times companies interpret that as just telling developers what to build,” he said.

This isn't product management by any meaningful definition. It's project management dressed up in product language, often because HR departments don't understand the distinction between the two when they're hiring. 

The result is that many product managers in Africa aren't empowered to do discovery work. They're not investigating problems or exploring solutions. They're just executing on roadmaps handed down from executives or founders who've already decided what needs to be built. 

"You're just project managing a roadmap," Upenyu said. "You're not really doing discovery, or solving actual user problems."

He explained how, despite this challenge, there are companies out there that understand how to operate in a proper product model. If you're fortunate enough to find one of those companies, you can function as a product manager by definition. But many aren't that fortunate.

Getting internal buy-in

The second major challenge Upenyu identifies is buy-in from both internal and external stakeholders. No matter how many frameworks exist around product management and innovation, getting people to actually buy into them is extraordinarily difficult.

From an internal perspective, the challenge shows up in conversations about product discovery itself. Imagine trying to convince your CEO that discovery work is necessary. "How are they evaluating product discovery? Do they have a positive evaluation of it?" Upenyu said. Even if they theoretically support it, will they actively participate in doing it? That's what defines real buy-in: positive evaluation plus active participation.

Upenyu credited Tendayi Viki with pushing hard on this human element of product work. "Many product managers in Africa have learned all of these frameworks and read all of the product books. It's now all about getting buy-in from the rest of the company to implement them.

His approach to gaining buy-in has evolved from pushing to teaching. When working with founders in a consulting capacity who insist they already have the solution, he doesn't fight them directly. Instead, he tries to understand why they feel they need to put that solution out. 

Why aren't they focusing on the problem first? Then he starts small, building up gradually. "Can you tell me what the one problem is that you feel you want to solve? Give me the evidence and kind of build up towards that," is an approach he tends to start with. 

At recruitment talent platform Jobox, Upenyu explains how he has been fortunate to work in an environment open to experimentation. "We've always been open to trying out different things," he says. When AI capabilities emerged that could help with prioritisation, the team jumped straight into exploring them. But he knows this isn't typical. The key here is to start small, understand what resistance you face, and build from there.

A principle that Upenyu has embraced comes from Marty Cagan’s book, Empowered - product is all about the team. As the solo product manager at Jobox, he has worked hard to ensure that his entire team understands this. "I usually say that I’m here to provide direction on how we need to solve a problem. But everyone is involved in solving the problem."

His customer success team understands what types of questions to ask users. His engineering team doesn't just accept requirements blindly. "When I sit down with them and say, ‘hey guys, I need to build this’, I encourage them to push me for more context." If they don't understand, they'll say so. 

"You can't do it all alone”, he said, “It's unrealistic to believe that you're the only person who can solve problems in the company." 

The job gets easier when you empower everyone around you. "My team knows that product is ours, and we figure this out together.”

Getting external buy-in

External buy-in presents a completely different challenge. Upenyu sees it as similar to product adoption. You could solve a problem, but it may not be a problem that people are willing to pay for.  

This question led to Jobox's pivot. The company started as a tech solution, but the market kept signalling that customers wanted something different. "A lot of people don't want the tech, but they want the service of being able to place students in different companies," Upenyu explains. The company had built technology for matching students with corporate placements, but what clients really wanted was someone to help them through the entire process.

"For a lot of African founders, that transition is very difficult because we're so used to thinking that everything needs to be a tech solution,” he said. The pressure to be a tech company is intense, particularly when seeking funding and trying to scale. But sometimes the market is clearly saying something different. 

Jobox decided to focus on the service element whilst also looking to be tech-enabled in delivery. They're not the only company helping corporates and governments place students at companies. Many competitors exist. The difference is that most of them operate using spreadsheets and email. "Our team wanted to actually be tech-enabled. So we built our own platform for managing the service delivery,” he added. 

The team at Jobox over time realised they could spin out this platform to other organisations. "We're now able to slowly pivot back into being a fully tech company that can sell that solution." The team learned that if solving the problem requires a service, there's nothing wrong with that approach. The key is finding ways to use technology to enhance the service rather than replacing it and fully relying on it, Upenyu explained.

His manager often reminds him that, whilst it might not be a traditional tech solution, they're actually scaling their service using technology. That still counts as achieving the product-led outcomes investors want to see, as long as you can deliver at scale. 

Upenyu says that the market response has been very positive, though B2B sales cycles remain challenging. Jobox started with pilot programmes, offering to place ten students and demonstrate their approach. Clients responded enthusiastically, scaling to 50 or 200 students. The main challenge now is competing against legacy players who've been in the market for a long time. 

Currently, Jobox focuses exclusively on South Africa. "The big thing for us has been, how do we just figure out this current model, this current product that we're building in this market, and then start to see, can we expand later on?" Upenyu said. The core problem of helping people get jobs exists in every country, and other nations run similar placement programmes. The next research phase involves discovering whether those programmes exist elsewhere and how Jobox might help them. But the focus remains on doing well in South Africa before attempting to scale across countries. 

Looking Forward

When asked about the product management profession and the wider technology scene in Africa, Upenyu said, "The profession is growing. From the time when I started, we didn't have conferences like the Inspire Africa conference. We were more learning about product management from other regions."

What's changed is that Africa now has enough product managers that they can learn from each other how to do product work specifically in African contexts. "The markets are very unique," Upenyu noted. The fact that product managers can now share knowledge through LinkedIn, conferences, and other networks means they have the opportunity to figure out what product management truly means on the continent.

The data challenge

Keena Patel entered Product from a biomedical engineering background. After university, she spent three years at Bloomberg in London, starting as a portfolio specialist before moving into sales and then a product sales role.

Through networking and persistently messaging on LinkedIn, she met the Chief Growth Officer at Financial Services platform, Watu Credit. 

That introduction led to an informal chat with her now manager, where they essentially co-created her product role. "We scoped out the role that I'm currently in together," Keena explained. "Whereas most product teams don't have an explicit product growth manager, it's usually intertwined with your Product Marketing Manager or a UX specialist. It's never a standalone role." Keena said, explaining her role. 

She's now been in product for two years, her first traditional product role despite some product sales experience at Bloomberg.

The first-time user problem

When discussing challenges specific to product management in Africa, Keena identified tooling as a major obstacle. Many global tools are designed for contexts with more consistent infrastructure, which presents unique challenges locally. "That can be as simple as you have running electricity every day of the week, or you have an internet connection." Internet connection particularly affects Watu Credit, which operates in mobile phone financing. "Online engagement is central to Watu’s growth strategy, as it enables stronger digital customer relationships."

This creates a fundamental disconnect. In Western contexts, these infrastructure challenges are rarely a thing, while it’s the complete opposite in Africa. Everything must be viewed through the lens of the first-time smartphone user, the first-time internet user. "You're upskilling your customer whilst also trying to sell your product."

This was an interesting learning curve early in her role: how she sees and interacts with an app isn't necessarily how her end customer will interact with it. In the West, her experience was straightforward. "It's very easy to explain something to someone in the UK,” she explained. "In Africa, explanation and utility must be conveyed simultaneously. It's explaining and utility that you have to fit in one go to increase user adoption.” 

Many rural regions still lack infrastructure. "How do you get a phone inside a farmer's hand who is 50 kilometres away from any feasible town?" Keena said. “How do you support that customer? What services or tools can you provide that aren't physical?”

These questions became apparent in countries like Uganda, where populations are far more dispersed outside Kampala. Watu Credit had to partner with dealerships and small kiosk shops located in villages along roads. "We partner with those grassroots dealers to expand our reach. However, this introduces new complexities around logistics, product distribution, and fraud prevention.”

The typical scaling pattern for African businesses is problematic: as customers increase, companies employ more people to service those customers. Watu Credit wanted to break this cycle. "Our team's primary challenge was addressing an increasingly large call centre that continued to grow as the customer base expanded.” She explained how the call centre could no longer keep up with the level, the amount of inquiries and questions that were coming in from the clients.

Now, Watu has a product that handles most issues customers would have previously called about. It's a solution that wouldn't seem revolutionary in developed markets but represents a significant achievement in contexts where first-time internet users are learning to navigate digital tools.

The multi-market reality

Watu Credit operates across approximately ten countries: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, DRC, South Africa, Mexico, Rwanda, and they're entering Brazil. Managing product across such diverse markets creates a lot of complexity.

"If we work on Mexico hours, that's a whole eight or ten hours behind us, which changes our entire work schedule." Creating a unified team across African and LATAM timezones is virtually impossible without people stationed in those regions. Watu maintains on-ground teams that are local, hiring people to run specific country operations. But synergy between regions is lacking. "Uganda won't know what Sierra Leone is doing for example. Bridging that gap is going to be the most important part."

After building products for African markets, expanding into a country like Mexico introduces entirely different regulatory requirements. "Each market operates under its own financial and regulatory framework, so our team has to deeply understand local compliance while ensuring a consistent product experience across countries." As a product team, you're managing legal requirements that differ dramatically across markets whilst trying to build a product that's basically analogous.

This multi-market reality is reflected in the structure of the product team. Product reports into Operations, which allows closer alignment between on-ground execution and customer experience. 

Below the Head of Product are several mid-senior level employees split by region and function. Two product marketing managers divide countries between them. Keena serves as the product growth manager. There's a product partnerships manager handling all third-party integrations, currently largely focused on WhatsApp and chatbot functionality. A product payments manager manages payment provider integrations for each country.

The team also includes a UX/UI designer who collaborates closely with an external Kenyan company that handles all app development. "We don't have any devs in-house for app design or app creation, that's all external." Underneath the first tier, Keena has a product growth analyst reporting to her, whilst product partnerships and product design have product support people.

All countries have their own org charts, but the product team sits at the group level, not under any specific country structure.

Learning and Development

Despite structural challenges, Keena feels fortunate in her learning opportunities. Her manager worked for well-organised global companies and brought that discipline to Watu. "We do have opportunities to do courses. I never learned how to code SQL until my job, and now I code every day." 

Keena’s manager actively pushes team members to develop new skills. He wants Keena to do speaking engagements and panels. The team has a dedicated training budget for courses. Additionally, the UI professional recently completed a development course to better understand backend work. Keena's analyst is pursuing training in machine learning.

The direction seems positive, with increasing investment in professional development and clearer career pathways.

Looking Forward

Despite challenges, Keena is optimistic about African product management's future. "I would not have moved back if I didn't think the African market was the place to be. So I'm optimistic." Africa has the youngest population globally, and the crucial challenge is creating enough jobs for those people to do something meaningful. "We don't have jobs, so we need to create things that will create jobs and create employment."

Additionally, a recurring pattern troubles her: large startups repeatedly failing in Africa. She attributes this to a lack of the right support systems. "Not having the right advisors, the people who are really going to steer you in the right direction." The pressure that comes with VC backing compounds the problem. "You have two years to do this and to do that, and you're on a tight schedule."

Bootstrap companies tend to perform better in African contexts because they can build incrementally. "I think building incrementally actually makes more sense in Africa than this idea of rapid, rapid, rapid iteration, and move to market and then crash and burn." The reason ties back to infrastructure complexity. As one conference speaker noted, when you solve a problem in Africa, you're solving a hundred problems with it. She hopes newer businesses and founders move in this direction, taking time to consider systemic challenges rather than rushing to scale.

For product management specifically, she urges those building products in Africa to build for African markets. "Whoever does this well is really going to crack the code.”

The easiest improvement would be creating more spaces for knowledge sharing. "Literally share ideas. I think there are so many things that I learned just from talking to people last week, which I would have loved to have had a forum, a place, a constant, just a place where you can know what people are doing." This needs to happen without the fear that someone will steal your idea, because there's space for products to run parallel with each other.

Building for internal users

Nana Yaw Nhyira Butah has worked across multiple industries in several product roles: education, real estate, construction, renewable energy, and fintech. Currently, he works as a Lead Product Manager at AmaliTech, which delivers software development services to companies across Germany and the United States.

"Product management in service-oriented companies is different, and that's been one of my biggest challenges," Nana begins. In a product company, you interact directly with customers or users. In a service company, those opportunities disappear. A client company approaches AmaliTech, saying they want to build something specific. "If you're a product manager, you are going to have to listen to them, and you're less likely to have the opportunity to talk to their customers or their users," he says.

The client becomes your customer, and you do what they say. It's difficult because you're making assumptions and testing hypotheses without access to real end users. "The person you have to deal with, in some cases, is either the delivery manager on the other side, or for some companies, they have a product manager, and that's a real challenge for a product manager in the service space."

Then there's the other side: building products for internal company use. At AmaliTech, the team built a fully functional Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system used for end to end business operations including Project management & Resouce Management, finance &accounting, HR, Performance and Payroll. Everyone in the company uses it. 

This creates a measurement problem. When products aren't optional for employees, it makes it very difficult to know what is working and what is not working, Nana explains. 

At best, people flag bugs and raise tickets about issues or features they can't access properly. Occasionally, you get tickets about features people want. You can talk to users since everyone works in the same organisation. "But because they don't have an option, you're not able to determine whether it really is a good product you've built."

Service companies aren't forever trapped in this paradox. If leadership understands the potential, internal products can be commercialised. Numerous companies have followed this path. Slack is perhaps the most famous example.

Once a company moves from pure service delivery to productising and commercialising solutions, the conversation around product and product managers having a seat at the decision table transforms completely. In pure service delivery, it's difficult for product managers, regardless of experience, to have real influence. "You deliver for clients. That's why we can actually have a delivery manager. In some cases, product managers end up becoming delivery managers in service companies."

Overcoming these barriers requires either finding companies that have already made the transition or helping drive that transition from within.

Compounding foundation 

In Africa, it is exceptionally challenging for smaller companies or those without substantial funding to enter certain markets. However, once larger players enter and establish infrastructure, it becomes easier for smaller companies to build upon those foundations. "We've seen this in the last 20 years. The Pan-African payment system wasn't available 10 or 15 years ago. So anyone building products for African transfer, of course, just across Africa for businesses, had to figure out where do we go, what do we have to fix."

Now that infrastructure exists, established by companies and banks that solved those foundational problems around 2016 or so. "So it's really such that anyone building products in Africa now won't have to really reinvent the wheel. You can ride on top of these infrastructure successes of companies, and then build your stuff."

Nana explains that the future looks bright from this perspective. The hard work of building core infrastructure has been done or is being done. New products can leverage those foundations rather than starting from scratch. But it required patience and substantial capital from early movers willing to solve problems beyond their immediate product needs.

Key skills to hone in on for PMs

When asked about the most important skills for product managers to develop, Nana's answer is immediate and emphatic: "Learn to understand problems. Find ways to understand problems you're solving for your targeted people."

He recounts a conversation with a colleague just before our interview, "Forget about features. Sit with customers, talk to them, observe, take a day off, sit with them in their offices, whatever, wherever they work, observe the processes that you want to build your products for. Make sure you understand the problem."

This approach ensures that when you're forming solutions, you know exactly what you saw and experienced. "If you don't know how to understand the problem, you can ship a thousand features, and it won't matter."

“It's different to think someone has a problem versus defending the pain you're solving for. Some people clearly have a problem, but they don't care. There's nothing wrong with that. Clearly, this person lacks that pain in that space. They probably aren't your target." But if you're a product manager working in a specific domain, empathy in that space becomes essential. Without it, making progress or creating impact becomes very difficult.

Another important skill is understanding the business itself. Product managers must understand how their organisation operates, how it generates revenue, and the constraints it faces. Without a business understanding, you can't really make progress or have an impact.

These might seem like basic skills, but Nana believes they're where many product managers fall short. The temptation to jump to solutions, to start designing features, and to move quickly through development cycles can all happen without truly understanding the problem you're meant to solve.

Accessibility in technology 

Speaking about the future of product management in Africa, he shared a specific focus that emerged from his personal experience in high school, where he lived in a boarding house with visually impaired students. "These were visually impaired guys, and apart from sharing spaces like everybody else, they could change their clothes, literally everything. It was my first experience. I got quite excited about it."

Fast forward to joining AmaliTech, where he discovered they employ people with disabilities as tech professionals. "One of my most senior UI/UX designers is living with hearing and speech impairments. Two of my quality assurance engineers, one has visual impairments, the other has mobility challenges."

The more Nana engaged with these colleagues, the more frustrated he became about the lack of support for people with disabilities in tech and product management. He's now involved in programmes training people with disabilities in tech skills: software engineering, UI/UX, data science, data analytics, product management, customer experience, cyber security.

"Anyone can learn these according to their abilities," Nana explains. People with hearing and speech impairments excel in roles requiring deep concentration without needing to talk: development work, UI/UX, cloud engineering, and some product management. Those with visual impairments can do tremendous work in areas where they can listen and talk.

"I'm hoping that one of these days, some of our trainees become some of the best product managers, some of the finest cloud engineers," Nana says. He's building an entire training programme around this vision, seeing it as both a moral imperative and a practical opportunity to develop exceptional talent.

Nana is optimistic about the future of product management in Africa, however his optimism is grounded in patience and incremental progress. The infrastructure challenges that once seemed impossible are gradually being solved over time. 

Connecting the dots

Upenyu Hamudikuwanda wrestles with buy-in, teaching founders and executives to embrace the discovery process. Keena Patel navigates infrastructure issues, designing for first-time internet users across ten countries with wildly different regulations. Nana Yaw Nhyira Butah manages the service issue by building products without access to real users, while simultaneously working to make African tech more accessible. 

A key theme that emerges from these stories is that product looks very different across different continents. For African markets, you need buy-in skills to convince stakeholders that product thinking matters. You need infrastructure awareness to design solutions that work within real constraints. You need adaptability to function effectively, whether you're building pure products, tech-enabled services, or internal tools.

All three practitioners express optimism about Africa's product management future, based on seeing incremental progress, growing communities, and gradual infrastructure improvements.

Upenyu is excited that conferences like Inspire Africa exist, creating spaces for African product managers to learn from one another rather than only from outside sources. He sees product managers in Kenya, Congo, Nigeria, and South Africa sharing approaches and adapting each other's solutions. That knowledge sharing, he believes, will drive more progress than importing frameworks ever could.

Keena emphasises building incrementally rather than rapidly iterating to crash and burn. She's seen large African startups fail repeatedly, often because they tried to scale too quickly without solving underlying infrastructure problems.

Nana points to infrastructure that's now in place that didn't exist ten or fifteen years ago. Pan-African payment systems, regulatory frameworks for fintech, established processes for various sectors, these foundations mean newer companies can build without reinventing everything from scratch. Progress isn't always visible in individual products, but it's happening at the ecosystem level.

Community is key

The most consistent theme across all three interviews is the critical importance of knowledge sharing and community. Each practitioner, in their own way, emphasises that African product managers need spaces to share experiences, challenges, and solutions with each other.

Every practitioner who shares their experience makes it slightly easier for the next product person. Every failure that gets discussed openly prevents others from making identical mistakes. Every success that gets documented provides a model others can adapt.

The future they're optimistic about is one where Africa develops its own approaches to product management, builds on infrastructure foundations being laid today, and contributes unique perspectives to the global product management community.

That future is already emerging in the daily work of practitioners like these three, and it's worth paying attention to.