Josiah Gana
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About

The rarest kind of product person.

Strategy, design and delivery in one person — because in the markets I work in, you rarely get to specialise.

I did not come to product through business school. I came through engineering.

My BEng is in mechanical engineering and my MEng is in production engineering, where I wrote a thesis measuring the gloss and surface quality of autobody paint finishes across workshops in Kaduna. It was published. It was also the first time I understood that most problems people call subjective are actually measurable if you are willing to define the measurement.

That is the job I have been doing ever since, with software instead of paint.

Health. At eHealth4everyone I joined as Senior Product Designer on MSDAT, the national Multi-Sectoral Data Analytics Tool. My argument was that policymakers should meet the country as a map before they meet it as a table, so I led the GIS layer. I then moved into Product Manager and owned the lifecycle through MSDAT 2.0 — web and mobile — coordinating data scientists, analysts, engineers and the business side through release.

Education. At Pathfinder Consulting I was Product Lead on Jobvoy.ai, a career platform for African graduates. We looked at more than a dozen competing products and concluded that the market did not need another job board; it needed a co-pilot — discovery, skill mapping and planning in one flow, with AI as a layer rather than a feature to advertise. I ran discovery, designed it, and shipped it alongside a bootcamp programme that put real cohorts in front of the product.

Enterprise. At GEN128 I led the IT and design teams through CRM128, a six-module business management suite — clients, inventory, accounts, HR, projects and appointments. The competition was not other software. It was WhatsApp and Excel, which is what most Nigerian SMEs actually run on, and which is a much harder thing to beat than a feature list.

Now. I run Roar Media, a small product studio in Lagos, where I build the tools I keep wishing existed: a WhatsApp-native CRM, a billing back office, a short-let management platform, a retirement calculator built for Nigerian salary structures. I also hold the digital product brief at Africa Health Report.

What I am looking for next is a senior product role where the problems are complicated, the stakeholders are plural, and someone needs to own the thing end to end.

What I bring

AreaSpecifics
Product managementRoadmapping, prioritisation, discovery, competitive analysis, agile delivery, stakeholder alignment
Product designFigma, Adobe XD, wireframing to high-fidelity, component libraries, usability testing, accessibility
Data & researchGoogle Analytics, Mixpanel, Tableau, SQL, user interviews, A/B testing, GIS data visualisation
TechnicalHTML/CSS, WordPress, Webflow, Builder.io, GCP, Odoo, systems integration and migration
AutomationMake, Zapier, Zoho Flow, Power Automate
DeliveryJira, ClickUp, Trello, Zoho Sprints, Bitrix24, Confluence, Notion

Credentials

  • MEng, Production Engineering — Nigerian Defence Academy
  • BEng, Mechanical Engineering — Federal University of Technology
  • Google UX Design Certificate — Coursera
  • Product Lead Growth — Product School
  • Product Management — Great Learning
  • Introduction to Software Product Management · Software Processes and Agile Practices — Coursera
  • UX Deep Dive: Usability Testing — LinkedIn Learning
  • Published: Gloss Evaluation of Autobody Paint Finishes by Some Enterprises in Kaduna Metropolis, Nigeria

Want the full version?

Beyond the work

What drives it.

01 Build for the constraint, not the demo.

If it does not work on a bad connection on a cheap phone, it does not work.

02 Develop the people around you.

The teams I have led have been young. That is a feature.

03 Honest numbers.

I would rather tell you what a product actually did than round it up.

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