From Nigeria to the UK: A Product Engineer's Journey

There's a version of this article I could write that would be clean and professional — a career retrospective with a clear arc, lessons neatly numbered, a tidy conclusion about where I've ended up. I'm going to try to write the other version instead.

Where It Starts

I grew up in Nigeria. Before I wrote a line of code, I made clothes. I trained in fashion design and tailoring — proper pattern-cutting, garment construction, the kind of work where your hands understand the difference between a well-finished seam and a rushed one. I mention this because it matters to who I am more than most people I meet in tech would expect.

Making things — really making them, with physical consequence — teaches you something that translates. The attention to how things fit together. The gap between what something looks like and how it performs under real use. The fact that craft is not decoration on top of function but woven through it. I didn't know at the time that I was learning anything relevant to software. I know it now.

The pivot to tech happened in 2009, when I joined Cobranet as a Presales Engineer. Lagos, internet infrastructure, enterprise clients. I spent seven years there learning how to translate technical complexity into something a business could understand and a decision-maker could act on. I was good at it. I also knew, somewhere around year four, that it wasn't where I was going to stay.

Andela and the First Real Leap

When I joined Andela in 2018 as a Software Engineer, I was making a bet. I'd been in presales for seven years. Moving into engineering — actually writing code, building things, being evaluated on what you ship — was a different kind of exposure. You can't approximate your way through it the way you can through client relationships and slide decks.

I had to become a software engineer in practice, not just in theory. I did. React, JavaScript, building frontends for Coursera, building clinical research tools for UMed. I learned the discipline of precise thinking that engineering imposes — the way a system either works or it doesn't, the way ambiguity in requirements translates directly into bugs downstream.

I also learned that I was more interested in what we were building than how we were building it. That observation would take another few years to fully act on.

The Move to Product, and What Nigeria Taught Me About It

When I moved into product at Bantu Blockchain, I was working on BantuPay — a digital wallet aimed at cross-border communities across Africa and the diaspora.

I want to say something about this that's sometimes uncomfortable to articulate in professional contexts: being Nigerian made me better at this job.

Not in a vague, diversity-of-perspective way. In a specific way. The users we were trying to serve were people sending money across borders, often to family, often in contexts where the fees taken by traditional remittance providers represented a meaningful percentage of the amount sent. I had personal and cultural context for why this mattered that no amount of user research could fully replicate.

When we discovered that 15% of transactions were failing because blockchain wallet addresses are too complex for reliable human input, and I designed the username-based system that fixed it — that solution came from understanding intuitively what the experience of sending money to family across borders actually feels like. The friction wasn't abstract to me. It was familiar.

I think about this when I hear conversations about representation in tech. It's not just about fairness, though it is about fairness. It's about the fact that products built without the perspectives of the people they serve are worse products. Not every time, not in every way, but systematically. The design of a better solution sometimes requires understanding a problem from the inside.

Coming to the UK

I arrived in the UK on a Global Talent Visa — a visa category specifically for people recognised as leaders or emerging leaders in their field. There's a satisfaction in that recognition that I won't pretend doesn't matter to me. Building a career across Lagos and various remote arrangements, accumulating real experience and real outcomes, and having that validated by a system that is, by its nature, selective — it felt like something.

The practical reality of being a new arrival is more complicated than any visa endorsement captures.

The UK tech ecosystem is different from what I'd experienced working remotely for African and global companies. The cultural register is different. The way you're expected to present yourself, communicate ambition, build relationships — there's a set of unwritten codes that everyone who grew up in this context absorbed without noticing, and that anyone who didn't has to figure out explicitly. I'm still figuring some of it out.

Reading, where I'm based, is quieter than London but connected to it in the way that all the satellite towns are — close enough to access the opportunities, distinct enough to have its own character. I've been exploring it genuinely, the way you explore a place when you're trying to understand it rather than just navigate it. Long walks along the River Kennet, discovering the area around Caversham, finding the neighbourhoods that feel like somewhere rather than anywhere.

What Doesn't Travel

Here's the honest part.

Experience doesn't always travel the way you expect. In Nigeria, I had seven years at a company where my relationships and track record opened doors. When you move to a new country, you start that social capital largely from scratch. The network you've built doesn't have presence in the new place. The references you have are from people an ocean away. The institutions you worked for may not be recognised.

There's a particular kind of invisibility that comes with this. Not hostility — mostly people are fine. But your history doesn't precede you. You're explaining who you are from scratch, over and over, in interviews and networking events and introductions, carrying in your head a full account of things you've done that the person in front of you has no context for.

It's exhausting in a way that's hard to describe to people who haven't experienced it.

I've also experienced the job search in the UK in ways I didn't anticipate. The process is formal in particular ways. The emphasis on certain institutions, certain companies, certain pathways — it creates friction for people whose trajectories don't fit the template. I've watched applications go nowhere that would have been straightforward in a context where my specific experience was more legible.

I'm not saying this to complain. I've been fortunate in real ways. The Global Talent Visa is genuinely rare and genuinely meaningful. I've had opportunities that many people in similar positions haven't had. But honesty feels more useful than a sanitised narrative about how it all worked out.

What I've Held Onto

The fashion design background. I still sew. I still make things. I upcycle clothes, craft objects, work with my hands. In a career that increasingly involves sitting at a screen telling AI tools what to generate, there's something grounding about making a physical thing. The care required is different. The feedback is immediate and non-negotiable. Either the seam holds or it doesn't.

The curiosity about how people in different places live. I travel when I can, partly because I genuinely love it, partly because travel has always been the fastest way I know to recalibrate my sense of what's normal. Things that feel like universal truths often turn out to be local conventions when you see them from outside.

The volunteering at Women Techmakers. This matters to me more than I find easy to explain. Being part of communities that are explicitly trying to make the industry more representative — not as a charity but as a structural correction — feels like meaningful work. The tech industry has serious diversity problems, and they compound. Being present and useful in spaces that are trying to address them is the least I can do.

The long walks. I walk more in the UK than I've ever walked anywhere. Reading and its surrounding areas reward it — the Thames Path, the Chilterns, the farmland between towns. Walking is where I think. It's also where I notice things: what a place actually is versus what it presents itself as, how communities use public space, what's changing and what isn't. These observations have no direct professional utility. I find them nourishing anyway.

Where I Am Now

I'm a Product Engineer. Not "a PM with coding skills" or "an engineer who did product for a while." Someone who can and wants to do both, in the integrated way that makes the distinction feel a bit artificial.

I'm co-founding NeuroCare AI — building behavioural intelligence tools for care homes supporting people with learning disabilities and autism. It's the project I'm most proud to be working on, partly because the problem is real and the people it affects have historically been underserved by good technology, and partly because it's the first time I've built something where my product instincts and my engineering capabilities are both fully engaged at the same time.

I'm also looking for my next role. That's its own kind of exposure, the job search — being evaluated and sometimes rejected, presenting versions of yourself and waiting to hear whether they landed. I'm doing it honestly and openly, which feels right even when it's uncomfortable.

The journey from Lagos to Reading, from fashion design to Product Engineer, from presales to blockchain to healthtech to AI — it doesn't have a clean through-line that would make a satisfying LinkedIn summary. It has, I think, an honest one.

I've been following what interested me, building what seemed worth building, and trying to be useful. That's not the worst way to have spent a career so far.

I'm still in discovery mode. I think I probably always will be.