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 are shipping real products into that, and they are shipping good ones.
So this is not a piece about what founders are getting wrong. It is a piece about where the next advantage is hiding, because I spent years looking for it in the wrong place.
For a long time, when something I built was not working, I looked for the reason inside the product. Wrong flow. Wrong label. Wrong hierarchy. Something in there had to explain it.
Products I have worked on ended up being used across twenty countries in Africa, and I can tell you where the answers actually were.
The age of the phone. What data cost that week. How far the nearest agent was. Who in the house actually owned the device. Whether anybody trusted handing cash to a stranger at the door.
Not one of those things lives inside a product.
They all live in the journey around it. And that journey is the richest source of insight you have, sitting there, free, mostly unexamined.
Your product is not the journey. It is the middle of it.
Start with how someone arrives. The GSMA reports a 60 percent usage gap in Sub-Saharan Africa. That is people who live inside mobile broadband coverage and are still not online. And when the GSMA and a group of leading African operators set out what an affordable 4G handset should look like, they were direct about the reason: affordability is the single largest barrier to getting online in the region. On their numbers, a 40 dollar phone would bring the internet within reach of another 20 million people.
Read that as insight rather than as bad news. It tells you your customer arrived on a device they saved for. It tells you storage is precious and every megabyte you ask for is a decision. It tells you that whoever paid for the phone may not be the person using it. Those are design instructions, and you only get them by looking at the step before your first screen.
Now look at how it ends. On Jumia, the payment volume running through its own payment service was 29 percent of everything customers bought in the last quarter of 2025. Read that the other way round. Most orders on the biggest e-commerce platform on the continent are still settled the old way, at a door, in cash, with a person, hours or days after checkout.
Which means the doorstep is part of your product whether you designed it or not. It is where trust is either built or lost. Treat it as a design surface and a whole set of decisions opens up. What the rider says. What the customer holds while they count out money. What happens when the amount is wrong. None of that is logistics. All of it is the experience.
The clearest example I know of a team taking this seriously is M-Pesa.
Somebody there asked a simple journey question. Where does the money come from, and where does it need to go? Not, what should the app do. The answer was that money starts as cash in a hand and has to end as cash in a hand, and the phone is the bit in the middle.
So they built for the whole path. By March 2026, M-Pesa had 333,011 agents, up from around 173,000 outlets in 2020. The agent network was not treated as overhead sitting beside the product. It was treated as part of the product, because on the customer’s journey that is exactly what it is.
That insight was not available inside the app. It was available in the journey.
There is a name for the discipline of looking this way, and it is older than most of us assume. In January 1984, G. Lynn Shostack published “Designing Services That Deliver” in the Harvard Business Review and gave us the service blueprint. Her argument was that a service can be designed as deliberately as a product, by mapping what the customer sees alongside all the layers of delivery they never see. Forty-two years ago.
That is the whole of a service design mindset. Not a job title. Not a workshop. Just a decision to design the whole path your customer travels, including the parts you do not control and the parts that happen out of your sight.
I have spent this period paying close attention to how services that genuinely work at scale get designed, and the pattern is consistent. The strong teams are not measuring how the interface looks. They are measuring whether people finish what they came to do. That single change pulls the whole journey into view, because finishing depends far more on what happens either side of the screen than on the screen itself.
I first met the discipline long before I met design, in a microbiology lab. You are never allowed to consider a sample in isolation. You have to know where it came from, what handled it before you, and where it goes after. Break the chain anywhere and your own careful work is worthless, no matter how good it was. A user journey is that same thinking, applied to people.
I will be honest that this is more work. It is slower than designing screens and it pulls you into logistics and agent economics you did not plan on owning. Nobody applauds a well designed handover. That is exactly why so much of the journey is still unexamined, which is also why there is so much advantage sitting in it.
So here is something worth twenty minutes.
Write down the five steps before your first screen and the five after your last. Not the ideal ones. The real ones, for the customer you actually have. Then put a name next to every step. Yours. An agent. A rider. A bank. The family member who owns the phone.
Some steps will have nobody’s name against them. Those are not failures. They are the places your next real insight is waiting, and nobody else in your market is looking there either.
You already know how to build. This is about seeing the whole path the people you are building for are travelling, so that what you build actually serves them.
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