I have killed three product roadmaps in my career. Not because the products failed, but because the roadmaps became fiction within weeks of publication.
In mature markets, roadmaps are stable. In Lagos, they are hopeful guesses.
I learned this lesson at Dot, where we are building financial inclusion products for Nigeria’s unbanked population. We started with standard agile ceremonies. Quarterly planning, sprint reviews, OKRs. The rituals of Silicon Valley product management.
Then the naira floated. The currency lost 40% of its value in months. O ur unit economics became meaningless. Customer behaviours shifted overnight as purchasing power collapsed. The roadmap we had spent weeks perfecting became irrelevant.
This is not unusual in emerging markets. It is the baseline.
Product managers in Nigeria develop a different relationship with planning. We learn to hold roadmaps lightly, to build optionality into every quarter, and to scenario-plan for currency devaluation, regulatory shifts, and election cycles that freeze economic activity.
The mistake is thinking this means abandoning the strategy. The opposite is true. When your environment changes constantly, you need clearer strategic anchors, not looser ones.
I now use roadmaps as negotiation tools rather than promises. They frame conversations with stakeholders about priorities and tradeoffs. They do not predict the future because the future is too volatile to predict.
At Xpress Payment Solutions, we managed relationships with 19 Nigerian banks. Each had different technical capabilities, risk appetites, and settlement timelines. A roadmap that worked for Bank A failed for Bank B. We learned to build modular roadmaps, core functionalities that worked everywhere, with bank-specific variants handled through configuration rather than custom development.
This approach requires more upfront architectural thinking. You cannot hack your way through technical debt when your regulatory environment shifts quarterly. The code you write today must adapt to requirements you cannot yet imagine.
Stakeholder management becomes the primary product skill. Not stakeholder management as taught in MBA programs, with RACI matrices and communication plans. Stakeholder management as a survival skill, reading the political dynamics of organisations, knowing when a bank’s CTO is about to be replaced, and sensing regulatory shifts before they are announced.
I spend approximately 40% of my time on what I call “environmental maintenance.” Not building features, but ensuring the environment remains stable enough to build features. Maintaining banking partnerships, monitoring regulatory communications, and tracking macroeconomic indicators that affect customer behaviour.
This is inefficient by Silicon Valley standards. It is necessary by Nigerian standards.
For product leaders expanding into emerging markets, the lesson is this: import your technical standards, not your planning assumptions. The playbook that worked in London or San Francisco will fail here. Build teams that can adapt faster than the environment changes. Hire product managers who have operated in volatility, who do not panic when the roadmap burns, who see constraint as a creative catalyst.
The products that win in Nigeria are not the ones with the best features. They are the ones that survived when everything else broke.
BY: Odunola Salako