1
Summary
Type
Digital Consulting
My Role
Fractional Product Manager
Business Model
2-sided market place
Location
Nairobi
Engagement
6 months
Core Brief
Build a new venture
In 2020 I partnered with Lori Systems, a Nairobi-based logistics tech company known as “the Uber for trucking in Africa.” I was brought in as a Fractional Product Manager to support their digital expansion efforts. The mandate was to translate market feedback into a new product roadmap that better fit enterprise customers across East Africa. Working remotely with teams in Nairobi and Lagos, I collaborated closely with the VP Product and regional ops leads to define features, prioritize dev resources, and validate improvements with field reps and clients.
Go-to-market
GTM responsibilities sat with the local commercial and partnerships team, who were focused on onboarding freight customers and improving fleet retention. My role intersected with GTM by ensuring product updates supported sales messaging — particularly around reliability, load transparency, and turnaround time. I also reviewed early client feedback loops and advised on UX blockers that impacted conversion from demo to active use.
Product & Design
As the fractional PM, I worked directly within the product triad (engineering, design, PM) to reframe the product around user needs captured from field ops. A key shift was simplifying the freight booking workflow and making dispatch more responsive. I facilitated weekly async check-ins between Product and Ops, set up Airtable as a feedback tracker, and helped define lightweight internal dashboards to monitor feature adoption and pain points.
Lessons & Resources
One valuable lesson was the need for more localized UX — especially considering drivers and fleet owners often used low-end Android devices and dealt with inconsistent connectivity. Designing for offline resilience became a priority. Another learning was how important it was to stay flexible with process — over-documentation slowed down progress in an environment where market feedback evolved week to week