About
- Currently
- Co-founder and Head of Product, Nestuge
- Based in
- South Carolina, United States
- Building for
- Creators in Nigeria and across Africa
I have spent seven years building Nestuge, a creator-economy platform I co-founded in 2019. Creators use it to sell courses, run paid communities, take payments across currencies and manage the people who buy from them. I own product: research, requirements, prioritisation, and the decisions about what we will not build.
The work I care most about is deciding how much a system is allowed to do on someone's behalf. The people I build for are not technical, and the product holds their income. That combination makes almost every design question a question about permission: what should happen automatically, what should require a person to look at it first, and what a product should refuse to do even when asked directly.
I lead cross-functional teams across product, engineering and customer experience, and have hired and managed product management interns. I have also negotiated integrations with payment providers and identity verification services, which is how a product like this one gets to operate in the markets it serves.
Before product
I came to this from geology. I studied it at the University of Nigeria and did a master's in geology and geophysics alongside a second master's in technical communication at Missouri University of Science and Technology, where I also taught technical writing and argumentation and redesigned a course under faculty supervision.
The geoscience background is more relevant than it sounds. Subsurface interpretation is the practice of making a confident decision from incomplete, indirect evidence, and then being explicit about your uncertainty. That is most of product management.
Research
I am a doctoral student in Rhetoric, Communication and Information Design at Clemson University, researching AI user experience for non-expert users. It is not a side interest. Original research I ran into how people actually use AI, and specifically how much of that use has become spoken rather than typed, is what put voice input into the AI agent I specified, before it launched. Creators then named it unprompted in interviews afterward.
I also hold a Google UX Design Professional Certificate, which is where the habit of running structured heuristic evaluations before writing a spec came from.