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Maria Adebayo

Hello,
I’m Maria Adebayo

Product Manager who turnsambiguity into shipped product.

Eighteen months across payments, lending and logistics — discovery through delivery. I start with the numbers, pressure-test them against real users, and write specs an engineering team can build from without a follow-up meeting.

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Lagos, Nigeria
--:--WAT · UTC+1

I build

  • Discovery
  • Delivery
  • Data

and everything
in between.

Case study — 2026

PayFlow

Transfers that clear on one bar of signal

Company
Orinlade Financial
Industry
Consumer fintech
Role
Junior Product Manager — owned the transfers surface
Timeline
Jan 2026 — present
Team
4 engineers, 1 designer, 1 data analyst

What moved

  • 34%

    fewer failed transfers

  • 61%

    drop in duplicate sends

  • 2.4k

    support tickets avoided / quarter

Deliverables

  • Discovery research
  • PRD & specs
  • Failure-state redesign
  • Experiment design

The problem

One in nine transfers on PayFlow ended in a state nobody could read — not failed, not settled, just spinning. Users assumed the worst and sent again. Support was drowning in “did my money go?” tickets, and the retry behaviour was quietly costing us reversal fees.

What I did

  1. 01

    Sat with 14 users in Yaba and Ikeja and watched them send real money on their own phones and their own networks — no lab, no prototype. Eleven of them had a personal rule for what to do when the spinner hung.

  2. 02

    Pulled six months of transaction logs with the data analyst and found the silent-failure window: transfers stuck between 40 and 90 seconds were where every double-send lived.

  3. 03

    Wrote the spec around one idea — never show a spinner without a promise. Every pending state got a plain-English status, an expected settlement time, and a locked resend button that unlocked only once the ledger confirmed a genuine failure.

  4. 04

    Shipped it behind a flag to 10% of users, held it for three weeks, and read the reversal numbers before we let it out wide.

The outcome

Double-sends dropped off a cliff and the support queue lost its single biggest ticket category. The pending-state pattern got adopted by the card and bills teams as the house standard.

Case study — 2025

Rider Console

Fewer taps between pickup and drop-off

Company
Sabi Logistics
Industry
Logistics
Role
Product Analyst → Associate PM
Timeline
Sep 2024 — Apr 2025
Team
3 engineers, 1 designer

What moved

  • 9 → 3

    taps to close a delivery

  • 47%

    faster handover

  • 1.6k

    riders on the new flow

Deliverables

  • Field research
  • Task-flow redesign
  • Ops dashboard
  • Rollout comms

The problem

The dispatch app was designed for someone sitting still. Completing a delivery took nine taps across four screens, so riders parked to do it — or worse, did it moving. Our ops team saw the delay as rider laziness. It wasn’t.

What I did

  1. 01

    Rode along on eleven delivery runs across the mainland. Timed every interaction with the app and logged where riders stopped and why.

  2. 02

    Found the real cost: the app demanded a photo, a signature, a cash-collected amount and a status change as four separate blocking steps, in an order that didn’t match how a handover actually happens.

  3. 03

    Reordered the flow to match reality — one screen, glanceable, with cash confirmation defaulted from the order and the photo optional for prepaid drops. Nine taps became three.

  4. 04

    Wrote the rollout comms in pidgin and English and recorded a 40-second walkthrough, because a changelog nobody reads is a change nobody makes.

The outcome

Average handover time fell by nearly half, and stationary-app-use incidents dropped sharply. Ops stopped treating it as a discipline problem.

18months in product

I came in through the support queue

Before product I did support, executive assistance and data entry — which means I spent a year reading complaints in the user’s own words and another learning where operational work actually breaks. Then analytics, then product. It is an unglamorous route and the best training I could have had.

Support → Analyst → Associate PM → PM.

  1. 2014 — 2017Lagos State UniversityMicrobiology
  2. 2022 — 2023Independent contractsData Entry · Executive Assistant
  3. 2023 — 2024Sabi LogisticsCustomer Support Personnel
  4. 2024Sabi LogisticsProduct Analyst
  5. 2024 — 2025FreelanceProduct consulting — early-stage edtech
  6. 2025Sabi LogisticsAssociate Product Manager
  7. 2025 — PresentOrinlade FinancialProduct Manager, Payments

04products shipped

Shipped, not shelved

Payments, SME credit, operations tooling, learning. Different industries, same job: find the thing that is quietly costing the business or the user something, prove it with numbers, and get a fix in front of people before the quarter turns.

Roughly 120,000 people use something I helped ship.

01demanding market

Built under real constraints

I build for intermittent connectivity, shared devices, metered data and users with no patience for friction. Products that hold up under those conditions tend to feel effortless everywhere else — it is the most useful design constraint I have worked with.

Based in Lagos. Open to remote and to relocating.

  • User Interviews
  • Funnel Analysis
  • PRDs & Specs
  • A/B Testing
  • SQL
  • Amplitude
  • Figma
  • Jira & Linear
  • Roadmapping
  • Stakeholder Comms
  • Offline-first Design
  • Agile Delivery

03How I work

Not a framework. Just how I actually work, learned mostly by getting it wrong first.

Six things you can expect from me

Go where the user is

The insight is never in the dashboard alone. It is in a rider’s hand at a junction, or a trader’s ledger under a market awning. I get out of the office for it.

Bring the number, then the story

I came up through analytics, so I open with what the data says and follow it with what it means. Opinions are cheaper when they arrive second.

Ship small, learn loudly

A flag on 10% of users for three weeks beats a perfect launch nobody can reverse. I would rather be wrong cheaply and early.

Constraints are the interesting part

Intermittent connectivity, shared devices, metered data. Designing for the hardest conditions first makes the product better for everyone on the easy ones.

Write it down properly

Half of this job is being unambiguous in writing. If an engineer has to ask me what a spec means, the spec was the problem, not the engineer.

Junior is a title, not a ceiling

I ask the obvious question in the room everyone else is too senior to ask. It has saved us more than once, and I have no plans to grow out of it.