Quick Fire 🔥 with Ibukun Adedeji

Ibukun Adedeji is a technologist and product leader working on large-scale financial and operational systems across Africa. He is currently a Product Manager at Moniepoint, where he contributes to products that power millions of businesses through payments and financial infrastructure.

Over the past several years, Ibukun has worked across lending, payments, commerce, and investments business areas, building and scaling digital products in complex, high-volume environments. Before Moniepoint, he held product leadership roles at companies including Flutterwave, Sabi, and Lupiya in Zambia, where he worked on credit, payments, and investment products serving emerging markets. 

Recently, his work and thinking have expanded toward energy and infrastructure. He spends time researching, writing, and speaking about technology and the role reliable infrastructure plays in shaping economic behaviour across emerging markets.

• Explain what you do to a 5-year-old.
  

Imagine you have a piggy bank where you keep your money. Now, imagine there’s a magical piggy bank on your parents’ phone that can do really cool things like send money to grandma, pay for your snacks at the store, or even help your parents save money for your birthday party. 

My job is to think about what would make that magical piggy bank work really well for other adults. I talk to lots of people to understand what they need, then I work with the people who build the magical piggy bank to make sure it’s easy to use and helps everyone with their money. I make sure the magical piggy bank is safe, easy to understand, and does exactly what people need it to do.

• What’s one rookie mistake you made while working in product, and what did that teach you?
  

In hindsight, I focused a lot on my output as a product manager rather than pursuing business outcomes. The lesson there is for product managers to reduce their involvement in activities that drain energy without pushing the needle or making an impact on the metrics that really matter. As a product person, the priority should be to shape business outcomes while giving your customers a super experience.

• What’s one career hack you swear by for working in product?
  

Let me give two instead. One. Focus on the business, and two, principles and outcomes. When you are tasked with a problem or an objective to drive. You need to understand the objective from the standpoint of the outcome to be achieved. 

To achieve it, you will need certain tools, and they fall broadly into two categories: product discovery and product delivery. Understanding the principles behind the tool you are using will help you to achieve your outcomes faster.

To document specifications for a product, you could either map a Product Requirement Document (PRD), draw flows, create a service blueprint, or a combination of these artefacts, depending on the stakeholder or where you are in your discovery or delivery phase. The tools serve different needs; you need to understand the principles behind them to choose the best one and reach your outcome faster.

• What’s one thing about user behaviour in emerging markets that still surprises you?
  

Resilience and creativity in how people adapt technology to their realities. When you design a product, you imagine a fairly clean flow of how it should be used. But users in emerging markets often bend the system in ways you never anticipated because they are solving real problems in their day-to-day lives.

For instance, a payment product might be designed for simple transfers, but merchants start using it as an informal accounting system. Or people begin routing money through multiple wallets just to manage liquidity across different networks. What you thought was a feature becomes infrastructure for behaviours you didn’t originally plan for.

What still surprises me is how quickly users discover these new patterns. It reminds you that once a product is in the wild, it stops being your system and starts becoming their tool. The job of a product team is to observe those behaviours early and evolve the product around them.

• Let’s talk about trust and building for a market still short on it. What one thing do operators overlook about technology and how it shapes economic behaviour?
  

When it comes to technology and users, I have seen operators assume trust is a feature or something to be built outside of the technology. It’s not. It’s an outcome of reliability. When power fails, when payments are reversed, when systems lag, outside of the obvious increase in support tickets, users will start adapting by lowering their expectations, or even start looking towards competitors’ products. So reliability matters a lot.

However, the non-obvious part is how the reliability is then communicated to the user. And there are different factors like the language used, the timing of confirmations, and the visibility into what is happening behind the scenes. These all influence how people behave economically. I would implore operators to look beyond just building technology that works, but also building systems that make reliability visible to the user. That visibility is what ultimately drives economic trust.

• When building fintech products for emerging markets, what is the biggest trade-off you’ve had to make?
  

Speed and completeness. Working at the intersection of dispute resolution and operational excellence means, while ensuring the customer is happy by making sure they get their refund request or dispute sorted quickly, I also have to make sure the company is not out of position because I want to do it fast. 

• What’s one part of Africa’s fintech ecosystem that excites you, but people aren’t paying enough attention to right now?
  

I will say Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS). PAPSS is an infrastructure designed to facilitate intra-African transactions. Before this time, sending money between two African countries often involved gymnastics, like converting to a base currency, then converting from that currency to the currency of the recipient country. That whole process makes it expensive, and it takes time.

The idea that we can now send instantly between two African countries, settled almost instantly, is an exciting one for me.

• You’ve recently expanded your work into energy and infrastructure. How do you see reliable infrastructure shaping economic behaviour in emerging markets, and what’s one misconception people have about its impact?

Energy is a fundamental substrate in how we live. If it is not constant or is low, it starts affecting the choices to be made. This is even more apparent in emerging markets. For instance, a 24-hour economic window means trading and commercial activities never stop, but you can’t have that if power is not constant. The impact in that sense is subtle, but when you look at it commercially, it is huge.

Infrastructural reliability will ultimately lead to a better-designed society where the living experience of the average human in that society is not shaped by the gaps.

One big misconception is that we can’t have it better or it will take a while, but I understand how hard it is to live within a dysfunctional system and be tasked with imagining or willing to live the entire opposite of the system. As long as it doesn’t break the laws of physics and is commercially viable, it won’t take us long to plug the gaps.

• If you could go back and advise your younger self starting in fintech, what’s the one thing you’d say?
  

Get into operations early. Sit with the settlements team, watch reconciliations happen, and understand where money gets stuck. Most product managers (PMs) think operations is someone else’s problem: finance’s problem, engineering’s problem. But in fintech, operations is where your product promise either comes true or falls apart.

I’ve learned this the hard way. You design a great feature that promises instant payments, but say you didn’t understand that bank settlement happens in batches. So users see “Sent successfully,” but their recipient doesn’t get the money until the next day. Your product just lied to them, not because the code was wrong, but because you didn’t understand the rails and communicated that clearly to the user.

Operations people know where the system actually breaks, where the manual workarounds are, and where competitors struggle. That intelligence should inform your product strategy from the beginning.