Role: Co-Founder & Product Operations Lead Company: Novek Tech Ltd — software product company, Lagos, Nigeria Duration: November 2020 – May 2024 Stack: Jira, Notion, Postman, Cypress, GitHub
I co-founded Novek with a software engineer partner in late 2020. Across four years we built fintech, social media, and church-management products for clients and our flagship internal product, SchoolHub, an AI-powered school management system serving Nigerian schools. As Product Operations Lead, I owned feature specification, user research, and the delivery practices that let a small team ship multiple products in parallel without quality collapse. Built lightweight risk-tracking systems that flagged blockers ~20% earlier and introduced QA discipline that scaled with each new project.
We started Novek with a clear hypothesis: African SMBs and emerging fintechs need software built for their context, not adapted from elsewhere. We took on client work; fintech apps, social-first products, a church-management app and used the revenue to fund the development of SchoolHub, our own product targeting Nigerian schools.
The challenge was never building software; my co-founder is a strong engineer. The challenge was coordinating work in parallel. Each client engagement came with different stakeholders, different scope conventions, different release expectations, and different definitions of "done." Without process, we'd either ship buggy work or miss deadlines usually both. As a two-person founding team, we couldn't afford either outcome.
Standardized the front of the funnel. I owned discovery for every client engagement: user research, requirements elicitation, and feature specification. The output was a consistent spec format; context, user stories, acceptance criteria, edge cases regardless of whether we were building a payments flow, a livestream feature, or a school report-card module. That consistency meant my co-founder could move between projects without re-orienting his mental model each time.
Built a lightweight risk-tracking system. Instead of a heavy weekly status meeting, I ran a short async risk register. Every active project had three open questions visible to both founders at any time: what's blocked, what's at risk, what's about to ship. This caught problems roughly 20% earlier than our previous reactive approach, where issues only surfaced after something had already broken. The cost was a few minutes a day; the benefit was avoiding sprint-ending fire drills.
Introduced QA gates that scaled with project size. Every product, no matter how small, got a written test plan tied to acceptance criteria. For larger projects we layered in Postman API tests and Cypress flows for critical paths. The discipline cost us a day or two upfront and saved us weeks of rework downstream. This was also where I first started building the QA muscle that became central to my later work at Omic.
Owned SchoolHub end-to-end. SchoolHub was the long-term bet. I led user research with school administrators and teachers across Lagos and beyond, defined the feature roadmap, and translated school-operations problems; report cards, biometric attendance, exam workflows, fee management into shippable product specs. SchoolHub today serves Nigerian schools as an integrated school management platform, with active expansion into AI-powered lesson notes, teacher-assistant features, and CBT exams.