Some of the hardest product work happening anywhere in the world right now is happening in African markets. Building where the payment rails are still forming. Where devices are old and data is expensive. Where you cannot lift a Western playbook off the shelf, because it was written for conditions you do not have. Teams…
Nobody in that room had ever been taught how to do this
Eight people. Two hours in the calendar. A whiteboard, a fresh pack of markers, and a founder who opened the session by explaining, in some detail, the idea he had already decided on. You know how the next ninety minutes went. A few people agreed with him. One person offered something different and watched it…
The most impactful thing I ever built was not a product. It was a community.
I have built things I am proud of. Digital products used by people across an entire continent. National infrastructure inside a government. Work with a level of scale and scrutiny most people never see up close. You cannot build a meaningful life or career alone. Nobody who lasts actually does. I want to take that…
The next wave of innovation will not happen without government. It never has.
There is a myth so common we stopped noticing it is a myth. The myth is that innovation is something the private sector does to a grateful world, while government stands to one side, slow and skeptical, catching up years later with regulation nobody asked for. Most of the tech press is built on it….
The most valuable thing I ever learned as a designer had nothing to do with design.
The most valuable thing I ever learned as a designer had nothing to do with design. When I put together my case for the UK Global Talent visa, I sat down expecting to talk about my craft. The tools I had mastered. The interfaces I had shipped. The years of learning how to make things…
The first thing to do is not build. It is watch.
A while ago I sat on a call with someone in a country I have never been to, watching them use a service my team had spent months building. They got stuck in a place none of us had predicted. We had tested that flow more times than I can count. We had reviewed it…
The Long Way to a Breakthrough
The first thing they teach you in a microbiology lab is patience. I was a student then, years before anyone would call me an innovation strategist. My world was a bench, a flame, and glass dishes with life growing inside them. You did not rush. You labelled everything. You wrote down every step, even the…
The Expertise Advantage Framework.
I came back from London Tech Week with one thing confirmed, and it was not a new trend. It’s one of my frameworks. I call it the Expertise Advantage, and the whole week kept handing me evidence for it. The conversations in those rooms circled the same excitement I have heard for some time now….
AI Didn’t Level the Playing Field. It Changed the Game Entirely.
I was sitting in a session at London Tech Week last week, and the energy in the room was unlike anything I have felt in a professional setting in a long time. Founders, government officials, product leads, and investors are all watching the same thing shift in real time. The conversation was not about whether…
Most Organisations Are Sitting on Their Best Innovation and Don’t Know It
A few months ago I was working through the architecture of the National Data Library, the platform that gives the public access to UK government data. One of the most significant national digital infrastructure projects the UK has built in years. At some point in that work, a thought stopped me cold. The data was…