Ideas are cheap. Knowing which one to build first isn't.
I lead product at TagGrid, the identity and payments company I cofounded, where I took a long list of ideas down to a scoped first release. I've also taken two product ideas from research to PRD, one with a prototype you can click.
Open a project for the short version, or read the full case study for the problem, the calls I made and what came out of them.
01Giving Nigerian money an addressTagGrid · Cofounder & CPO · 2026 – now
A freelancer paid in dollars juggles three apps to receive one payment. TagGrid gives them one address, @yourname, that takes naira, dollars and stablecoins. My job was to cut a long list of feature ideas down to a first release built for them, with everyday Nigerians included from launch.
Identity is the product; payments are the way in.
All three wallets ship together, or the one-address promise isn't real.
Built on licensed partners, designed so any of them can be swapped.
02Turning one-off doctor visits into ongoing careAbara Care · Product study & prototype · 2026
Mama Chidinma is 52, sells provisions in Enugu and has high blood pressure, but she can't close her stall for half a day to see a doctor. In the brief I worked from, a telemedicine app kept only 14% of users after 30 days, because it offered one-off consultations. I wrote the PRD and built a working prototype around a doctor who follows up.
Three features as one loop: care plan, check-ins, same doctor. The health-tips feed was cut.
A licensed doctor makes every clinical decision; the app only summarises and nudges.
Target: 30-day retention from 14% to 30% or more, with a guardrail on muted reminders.
Time to check in You haven't logged your BP in 3 days.Log a reading
Amlodipine 5mg Take 1 tablet today
HomeCare PlanLogDoctor
03Helping young earners make their salary last the monthPennywise · Product study · 2026
Amaka takes home ₦195,000 in Lagos. Rent, money for her mother and a loan repayment come out first, so nearly half her salary is gone before the month starts. I wrote the market brief and PRD for a money coach built around incomes like hers, using Nigerian survey and inflation data.
Sits on top of the savings and banking apps people already use.
Keeps coaching clear of regulated investment advice.
Safety metric: every flagged conversation answered within 24 hours.
Four real decisions from my work. Pick what you'd do, then see what I chose and why.
Decision 1 of 4TagGrid
Launch with one wallet first, or naira, dollar and stablecoin wallets together?
The lean move is one wallet. The product's promise is one address for any kind of money.
My call: ship all three together.
If a Tag only receives naira, it's just another account number with a nickname. The address claim only holds if the same Tag takes naira, dollars and stablecoins.
Decision 2 of 4TagGrid
Build the payments infrastructure ourselves, or run it on licensed partners?
A young company, a regulated industry, and a small team.
My call: licensed partners, with one condition.
Custody, transfers and cards run through licensed institutions. The directory that maps each Tag to an account stays in our own database, so a provider can change without moving a single user.
Decision 3 of 4Abara Care
Retention is at 14%. Add a health-tips feed to bring people back?
A tips feed was on the table, and it's cheap to build.
My call: cut it.
People were leaving because the app stopped feeling relevant to them, and content doesn't fix that. A care plan, regular check-ins and the same doctor every time give them a reason to come back.
Decision 4 of 4Pennywise
Measure success by how confident users say they feel about money?
Self-reported financial confidence was already on the metrics list.
My call: track real behaviour, and add a safety metric.
I replaced the survey with behaviour change measured in real transactions. Then I added a promise: any conversation flagged for human review gets a response within 24 hours, every time.
About and approach
I build for the people most products forget.
Most products are designed for an ideal user who doesn't exist. I'd rather start with the real one: the patient who can't take a day off to see a doctor, the freelancer juggling three apps to get paid, the customer who gives up halfway through sign-up.
I don't tie myself to one industry. The job is the same anywhere: find the real problem, decide who to serve first, cut what doesn't matter, and write it down clearly enough for designers and engineers to build.
Scope is the decision. A fourth feature, a soft metric, a product line we weren't ready to run. What I cut is the clearest record of what I think the product is.
Break it on paper first. My cybersecurity training made this a habit: I work out how a product could be misused or fail before I work out how it gets used.
Own the trade-off. Most options on the table have a good argument. Picking one, explaining why, and owning it if it turns out wrong is the job.
Anuri
Experience and training
The timeline
Jul 2026 – present
Cofounder & Chief Product Officer
TagGrid Digital Services Limited, Port Harcourt
Decide what we build, who it's for, and what ships first
Turn those decisions into specs our designer and engineers build from
Plan the roadmap for two user groups: freelancers paid in dollars, and everyday Nigerians who send money and pay bills
Shape sign-up, BVN verification, PIN setup and account recovery with our designer
Wrote our privacy policy, terms of use, risk disclosure and AML/CFT policy
Lead compliance onboarding with our partners
2026
Product studies
Independent
Abara Care: research, PRD and a working prototype built in Lovable for chronic care in a Nigerian telemedicine app
Pennywise: market brief and PRD for a personal finance coach built around Nigerian incomes, family obligations and naira swings
2026
Diploma in Product Management
Strategy, research, PRDs and prototyping
2026
Certificate in Cybersecurity
Vulnerability assessment and GRC
2018 – 2022
BSc Biochemistry
University of Port Harcourt
Product
Product strategy, roadmaps, PRDs and specs, user research, prioritisation, success metrics, Agile
A digital identity platform for Nigeria. Claim @yourname, and people can find you, verify you and pay you with it, in naira, dollars or stablecoins.
Role
Cofounder & CPO
Timeframe
2026 – present
Market
Nigeria
I owned
Strategy, scope, compliance, partners
If you earn from abroad in Nigeria, getting paid means a bank app, a dollar account and a crypto exchange, and moving money between them by hand.
Context
TagGrid started as a long document listing every feature the product could ever have: wallets, cards, bills, savings, investments, crypto, a merchant layer, an identity layer. All of it was reasonable, and together it was far more than one team could build.
I came in as the product cofounder with one job: turn that into something we could build, launch and defend.
The problem
Nigeria has more wallet apps than anyone can name, and they compete on the same thing: moving naira between banks slightly faster or slightly cheaper than the next one. Entering that fight with less money than the incumbents was not a strategy.
But underneath the feature list was an idea nobody in the market owned. Nigerian money has no address. You receive money by reading a ten-digit account number aloud on WhatsApp. Earn in dollars, and you do that across three different apps.
Identity is the product. I sorted every feature into three layers and deferred anything that didn't make the Tag more useful to know.
IntelligenceVerified income history, insight, merchant identity. What becomes possible once the first two layers have run for a while.
Value exchangeNaira, dollar and stablecoin wallets, conversion, cards, bills, the ledger. The providers underneath are replaceable by design.
IdentityThe Tag, KYC and KYB, the directory that maps a name to an account. Never outsourced. This is the company.
From the working docs: the wish list, sorted
Identity
Never outsourced
@Tag handle
KYC and KYB
Name-to-account directory
Value exchange
Built on licensed partners
Naira wallet
Dollar wallet
Stablecoin wallet
Conversion
Cards
Bills
Later
Waits until the first two layers have run
Verified income history
Insights
Merchant identity
Savings
Investments
Lead with one user, launch for two. The first user we design around is the Nigerian freelancer or remote worker earning in dollars and living in naira. They feel the pain most sharply, and every foreign client who pays them sees the product work. Everyday Nigerians who send money and pay bills come in from launch too.
Ship the wallets together. The obvious lean move was one wallet first. I argued the opposite. If a Tag only receives naira, it's just another account number with a nickname. The claim only holds if the same address takes naira, dollars and stablecoins.
Build on partners, and design to switch. Custody, transfers and cards run through licensed financial institutions. I compared providers on their fees rather than their feature lists, and kept the Tag-to-account directory in our own database, so a provider can change without moving a single user.
Compliance from the start. I wrote the AML/CFT policy, privacy policy, terms of use and risk disclosure early, and built KYC and KYB into onboarding. A payments product is an attack surface, and I'd rather specify fraud controls up front than retrofit them after the first incident.
What I produced
Product strategy and positioning
Vision and roadmap with gated milestones and a KPI framework
First-release scope
Sign-up, KYC and account recovery flows in Figma
Legal and compliance suite: AML/CFT, privacy, terms of use, risk disclosure, acceptable use
Financial and accounting system specification
Partner evaluation and due diligence framework
What I'd do differently
I spent too long on breadth before forcing the first-user decision. The three-layer model was useful, but it was also a way of keeping every feature alive under a tidier heading. Choosing who to build for first is what moved the product, and I should have made that call sooner.
The chronic-care feature of a Nigerian telemedicine app: research, a PRD and a working prototype, built to turn a one-off consultation into a doctor who follows up.
Mama Chidinma can't close her stall for half a day to queue at a hospital, so she waits until it's a crisis.
Context
The brief described Abara, a Nigerian telemedicine app whose founder wanted it to feel like "a family doctor, not an emergency room," and whose 30-day retention sat at 14 percent. I researched the problem, wrote the PRD and built a working prototype.
The problem
Fourteen percent looks alarming until you compare it. Health apps lose around seventy percent of their users within the first weeks, and general health apps keep about six percent at day thirty. Abara was above the benchmark, and people were leaving because the app stopped feeling relevant to them.
The Nigerian layer sharpened it. Out-of-pocket payments make up 70 to 77 percent of health spending, so people pay per crisis and seek care per crisis. And around 30 percent of Nigerian adults have hypertension. Fewer than 40 percent know it, and fewer than 20 percent have it under control.
Abara's retention problem was a continuity problem.
What I decided
Fix continuity. Every competitor optimises the single consultation. Nobody owns what happens after. Abara already had verified doctors, a patient-owned record and a family plan, and was using them one visit at a time.
Build for Mama Chidinma. The obvious persona was a 35-year-old urban professional. The research pointed elsewhere: a 52-year-old who sells provisions at Ogbete Main Market in Enugu and pays for her care in cash. She doesn't need another way to reach a doctor in an emergency. She needs a doctor who keeps an eye on her between them.
My care planThe reason to return: what to track, how often, the target, the medication.
Check-ins and nudgesPaced reminders that escalate to her doctor when readings drift.
Same doctorShe never starts from zero. Every conversation opens with her history summarised.
Three features, one loop. A fourth, a health-tips feed, was on the table. I cut it. Content doesn't fix a relevance problem.
A licensed doctor decides. The app's smart features only summarise readings, time the nudges, flag values outside the doctor's range and draft a summary. A licensed Nigerian doctor makes every clinical decision, and every screen says so.
Measure whether people come back. I replaced daily active users with 30-day retention (14 to 30-plus percent in two quarters), care-plan return rate and repeat-doctor rate, plus a guardrail: nudge mute rate under 10 percent.
From the PRD: how success is measured
Building it
I built the prototype in Lovable. It only became reliable once I specified the behaviour and data exactly: six seeded readings from 156/96 down to 132/82, the thresholds for each status colour, and one shared data set so logging a reading updates every screen at once. The patient is fictional, and nothing is stored or sent.
Good morning,
Mama Chidinma
Your latest reading
132/82 mmHg
A bit high, keep logging
Target: below 130/80
Time to check in You haven't logged your BP in 3 days.Log a reading
Amlodipine 5mg Take 1 tablet today
HomeCare PlanLogDoctor
What I'd do differently
I added the privacy constraints after the first build instead of writing them in from the start. On a health product, safety belongs in the first spec. And the weakest point in the loop is manual entry. A cheap cuff that syncs a reading in one tap is the first thing I'd build next.
A personal finance coach for young Nigerian professionals, taken from problem to PRD.
Type
Product study
Year
2026
Output
Market brief, PRD
Market
Nigeria
It started with a question no money app in Nigeria was asking: why do you keep hitting zero on the 22nd?
Context
A product study in two parts: a market brief, then a PRD built on top of it. I picked personal finance because it's where a Western template fails a Nigerian user most completely.
The problem
Nigeria's inflation hit 34.8 percent at the end of 2024, and the naira lost more than half its value in two years. According to EFInA, 84 percent of Nigerian adults ran out of money in the previous twelve months.
The apps young Nigerians already use, PiggyVest, Cowrywise, Kuda, are good at holding money. None of them coach.
Nothing had looked at her actual situation and told her what to do, in order.
What I decided
Rebuild the brief for Nigeria. The first pass leaned on American statistics. Accurate, and useless. I rebuilt it from EFInA survey data, CBN inflation figures, and the apps Nigerians actually have on their phones.
PennywiseThe coaching layer. Reads across every account and tells you what to do next, in English or Pidgin, on WhatsApp if that's where you live.
PiggyVestHolds savings
CowrywiseHolds investments
KudaHolds the account
Sit on top of what people already use. Pennywise connects to the apps people already use and reads across them. It doesn't need to win a fight it can't win.
Keep coaching clear of advice. SEC Nigeria regulates who can advise on securities. A coach that drifts into "buy this" is a licensing problem before it's a product problem, so the brief draws the line explicitly.
A persona built from real numbers. Amaka earns ₦195,000 a month at a Lagos agency, sends ₦20,000 to her mother in Enugu, pays ₦55,000 rent and ₦15,000 a month on a loan. Once those are paid, the month is already tight. Every user story had to work for her.
Scope the MVP to two things. Show where the money went, with categories that reflect Nigerian life (rent, family transfers, loan repayments), then surface the one change that matters most this month. Irregular-income budgeting moved out of the MVP because it needs ninety days of data.
From the PRD: MVP scope
In the MVP
Moved out
Where the money went, in Nigerian categories: rent, family transfers, loan repayments
Irregular-income budgeting, because it needs ninety days of data first
The one change that matters most this month
Self-reported financial confidence as a success metric
Drop the soft metric, add the safety one. Self-reported financial confidence was on the list. I replaced it with behaviour change tracked in real transactions, then added a safety metric: any conversation flagged for human review gets a response within 24 hours, every time.
