Overview

PocketApp (formerly AbegApp) started as a social payments platform and grew into one of Nigeria's leading B2C financial services apps. We created it to introduce a more social and engaging approach to fintech.

I co-founded the start-up and led product across the entire lifecycle: from our first user, through the acquisition, through scaling past two million users. Along the way I solo-ed customer success initially until after the acquisition, then grew the team and led over 15 specialists. I owned quality across every release for six years. Following the acquisition, I stayed on to support the transition and continued leading product efforts across iOS, Android, and web dashboards, ensuring we consistently shipped scalable experiences that solved real customer needs.

We had over 5,000 downloads in the first 2 weeks of launch with zero marketing spend, attributable mostly to our down-to-earth, fun designs and the content I created. I also led cross-functional teams across engineering, design, marketing, QA, customer success, and growth, driving product strategy, execution, quality and scale across the business.

The Challenge

The Market

The Nigerian fintech market in 2018/2019 was crowded with apps that all felt the same: clinical interfaces, slow KYC, terrible customer support, with customer issues that disappeared into the void, and lots of brands building products that didn't factor in what users actually wanted. Users tolerated these brands because there weren't a lot of better alternatives; but they didn't particularly love them.

Our challenge wasn't building another wallet. It was building one that people love and could trust. We achieved this through clear and engaging interfaces, and created a brand that felt human and relatable, with a support function that treated users with empathy and their complaints as product signals rather than tickets to close.

The Product

The product was growing quickly because we shipped fast, but the downside of that speed was increasing product instability. Almost every release introduced new defects. While many issues were caught and patched internally before reaching users, others surfaced through customer support after release. Engineering teams moved quickly to implement fixes, but those fixes occasionally introduced new issues elsewhere in the product, creating a cycle of reactive patching.

As a result, support volume continued to rise, onboarding drop-off remained high, user-reported bugs began eroding trust, and App Store ratings started to decline. At the same time, there was no structured QA process in place to support the pace of releases or maintain product quality consistently across platforms.

We were also navigating an evolving regulatory environment, with new CBN circulars and compliance requirements that needed to be implemented within extremely tight timelines. Balancing speed, reliability, compliance, and user experience became one of the company's biggest operational challenges.

The question that drove the work

How do we maintain the speed that fuels growth while making the product significantly more reliable and rebuilding user trust?

What Customers Needed

  1. Trust: a reliable platform to make transfers, instant reversals, and a support team that responded like humans, not robots reading off scripts. I noticed users would tolerate one failure if the recovery felt personal.
  2. Speed: a KYC process that takes minutes to complete, not days. They wanted a personalised, reactive P2P payment flow that didn't feel like filling out a form or answering questionnaires.
  3. A relatable brand that felt like theirs: a down-to-earth, fun, and culturally specific brand. Most of our early growth came from users sharing our content on their own accounts because it sounded like them, including using our badges and IG filter.
  4. Money tools that worked together: Group savings, contributions, and bill payments in one place, with clear status, failure states, and recovery paths. The boring details, done well.

My Approach

1. Brand-led growth with zero marketing spend

Our launch hit 5,000 downloads in the first two weeks with no marketing budget. This was attributed mostly to our down-to-earth, fun design and content. The product voice was the acquisition channel.

2. I made quality a product responsibility, not just an engineering one

The default position in most teams I'd seen was that quality was engineering's problem, something that happened in the last day before release. I didn't agree with that framing. As PM, I put quality into everything, running structured UAT every sprint, and signing off releases personally. This improved the team dynamic and engineers stopped feeling like they were the bottleneck for shipping. We evolved to having a shared, visible process that improved the quality of products shipped.

3. Onboarding redesign

I led the redesign of the onboarding experience and validated it through multiple rounds of cross-device testing, confirming UX improvements and running regression checks across all affected flows. I only signed off once defined quality standards and user satisfaction criteria were met. Following launch, onboarding satisfaction scores increased by 15%.

4. From solo customer success to 15-person team

I built and scaled customer success before the acquisition, ensuring every ticket, every escalation, every angry DM was answered and resolved. After the acquisition, I scaled the function to a team of 15+ specialists and designed the workflows, escalation frameworks, and KPIs that kept quality intact at scale.

5. Cross-platform QA discipline

I designed and ran cross-platform test suites for iOS, Android, and web dashboards, maintaining separate test matrices per platform and catching defects that passed on one OS and failed on another. Over six months we cut user-reported bugs by 30%.

6. Retention via customer success

I treated a 15-person CS team as a live quality signal. Every user-reported bug was categorised by type and severity, escalated with reproduction context, and tracked to resolution. Retention went up 25%.

Impact & Achievements

What I'd do differently

1. Document the system more formally and publicly

Much of our operational knowledge lived in Notion, documentation, and team habits. While effective internally, it wasn't easily transferable. We later introduced a more structured playbook, but in hindsight, I would have started with that approach from the beginning to improve continuity and knowledge transfer.

2. Invest in process automation earlier

Tooling has improved significantly since 2019, and the cost benefit of automating critical workflows is now much clearer. Introducing automation earlier would have reduced manual process overhead and enabled the team to ship faster with greater confidence.

What this work taught me

  1. Six years in a startup taught me what you don't see when you ship across multiple environments quickly. You watch features you championed evolve in unexpected ways, and learn what truly scales and what doesn't. The highest leverage thing a lead PM can do is build a quality culture into a team early, before they need it. Once gaps appear at scale, they're harder to correct.
  2. Customer support is real-time product feedback. If your CS team isn't structured to capture user pain points with proper reproduction context and severity, the team loses one of the most valuable signals in the entire product loop.
  3. Brand voice can be an acquisition channel. Tone and product personality are often underestimated in growth conversations. 5,000 downloads in two weeks with zero spend wasn't luck, it reflected a product experience that felt native and owned by its users. I now treat product voice work as a growth lever, not a marketing afterthought.
  4. iOS and Android are not interchangeable and shouldn't be treated as "roughly the same." Every flow needs its own test matrix to prevent platform specific defects from slipping through unnoticed.
  5. Quality is a culture, not a phase. Every release should have explicit, agreed-upon criteria for success. Without this, "done" becomes subjective.