Role: Product Manager
Duration: 2023
Product: Neupay — Escrow Payment Application
Team Scope: Engineering, Design, Customer Support, Legal Consultant, 2 PM Interns
Neupay is a secure escrow application that facilitates safe transactions between buyers and sellers by acting as a trusted intermediary. It ensures funds or assets are held securely until all conditions of an agreement are met. The platform was built on Python (Django Rest Framework) and Flutter, hosted on Amazon EC2 with Amazon S3 for file storage.
The product existed in early development when I joined. A lean team had begun implementation, and my role was to take it from incomplete early-stage development to a live, compliant, market-ready product — while simultaneously training two PM interns who were working alongside me throughout the process.
Online commerce in Nigeria had a trust problem. Freelancers offering services to clients they had never met were frequently not paid after completing work. Buyers purchasing goods from online merchants were frequently blocked or ghosted after making payment. The rate of fraud in peer-to-peer and online business transactions was high, and there was no accessible, consumer-friendly mechanism for holding funds in trust until both parties fulfilled their obligations.
Banks and established fintech platforms did not solve this. The escrow product category — as I would discover — existed in a regulatory grey zone that made it genuinely difficult to build and operate formally.
Before continuing development, I went back to the company's objectives and goals to validate the product direction. Then I ran discovery interviews with two distinct user groups simultaneously — and deliberately kept them separate.
I spoke with online merchants — people selling goods through social media, WhatsApp, and informal online channels — to understand their experience of the transaction process. What made them nervous? When had they been burned? What would make them confident enough to ship before receiving payment?
I spoke with buyers — people who regularly purchased goods from online sellers — to understand their side of the same problem. Where had trust broken down? What had happened when a seller disappeared after payment? What would make them confident enough to pay before receiving goods?
These were not the same conversation. Merchants feared non-payment after delivery. Buyers feared non-delivery after payment. The product had to solve both fears in the same transaction flow — and the UX had to communicate that it was doing so to both parties simultaneously.