There is a familiar pattern across Africa’s startup ecosystem. A company launches a successful product. Soon enough, competitors emerge with similar features, matching interfaces, and often the same value proposition. Within a few years, the market becomes crowded with businesses offering largely identical solutions, competing over marginal differences in pricing, incentives, or customer-acquisition tactics.
For Arinze Onugha, a product leader who has spent more than a decade building products across Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and North America, this obsession with feature parity is one of the biggest reasons many products struggle to achieve meaningful scale.
The problem, he argues, is not that companies are building poorly. It is that too many are building the same thing.
“Many teams get trapped in the chase for feature parity,” he says. “They keep optimising existing products until they become indistinguishable.”
It is an observation that eventually inspired his book, Designing for Scale, which explores why some products become category leaders while others remain trapped in a cycle of incremental improvement.
The limits of incremental thinking
For many startups, growth often begins with studying competitors. What features do they offer? What are customers asking for? How can we make our version slightly better? At first glance, the approach appears logical. Product teams reduce risk by building what has already been validated in the market.
However, Onugha believes this mindset eventually creates a ceiling. “They were efficient products, but they were not memorable products,” he says.
The challenge becomes particularly visible in sectors where products increasingly look much the same and are difficult to differentiate.
Nigeria’s digital payments ecosystem offers a useful example. Most money transfer applications perform the same core functions. While providers may compete on transaction fees, exchange rates, or user experience, the differences are often marginal.
Victoria Fakiya – Senior Writer
Techpoint Digest
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As markets mature, this creates an important question: if every product looks the same, why should customers care which one they use? For Onugha, the answer lies not in optimisation but in category creation.
How to design for scale
Throughout his career, Onugha has worked on products across different industries and markets. He co-founded GICS Limited alongside his brother, a software developer, and helped build DropTaxi, a white-label ride-hailing platform currently deployed in dozens of cities globally. He has also worked in banking and enterprise technology, including roles at First Bank of Nigeria, Bizflex, Middleman, and Barclays Bank in the United Kingdom.
After spending years building products across different markets, Onugha began noticing a recurring pattern: many product teams were focused on improving existing products and on keeping up with competitors. Yet despite doing many things right, their products often struggled to stand out.
According to him, that observation became one of the motivations behind Designing for Scale, one of two books he has authored.
The book seeks to answer what he describes as one of the most important conversations in modern product leadership: why some products remain useful while others go on to reshape entire markets.
“I’ve actually seen teams do everything right by conventional standards, where they improve features, they optimise funnels, and they chase competitor parity,” he says. “But they end up with products that were efficient but not distinctive.”
For Onugha, the problem is not necessarily poor execution. Instead, he argues that many teams become trapped in incremental thinking, making products slightly better without fundamentally changing how users experience a category.
The book challenges that approach by teaching product leaders to think beyond feature additions and competitor comparisons. Rather than asking how to make an existing product marginally better, he believes teams should be looking for opportunities to create entirely new categories or redefine existing ones.
“It’s more around reshaping that mindset and about people creating category-defining moments,” he explains.
The ideas in the book are drawn largely from his experiences working across different markets and industries. From product work in Nigeria to projects involving teams and organisations in the United Kingdom, North America, Brazil, and Europe, Onugha says the lessons emerged from practical challenges rather than theory.
“It is not actually a theoretical product manual,” he says. “The book is grounded in reality.”
Many of the examples explore how scale appears differently across environments. In emerging markets such as Nigeria, products often have to solve not only customer problems but also infrastructure limitations, digital literacy challenges, and payment friction. In more mature markets, the challenge is often differentiation within highly saturated categories.
Those experiences ultimately shaped one of the book’s central arguments: scale does not come from doing the same thing slightly better. It comes from thinking differently about products, markets, and systems.
“The main lesson of the book is that real scale does not come from doing the same thing slightly better,” he says. “It actually comes from thinking differently about markets, products, and systems.”
What category leaders do differently
If incremental improvement has limits, what separates products that reshape markets from those that simply participate in them? According to Onugha, the answer lies in category creation.
He describes this as reaching a “category-defining moment,” the point at which a product becomes so embedded in people’s lives that its absence would fundamentally change their behaviour. A simple test, he argues, is to imagine a product disappearing tomorrow.
“Think about WhatsApp,” he says. “If it suddenly disappeared from your life, what would that feel like?”
Products that reach that level of relevance are no longer competing solely on functionality. They have become part of how people communicate, work, transact, or solve problems. Building such products requires looking beyond obvious feature requests and identifying opportunities that competitors may be overlooking. That often means reframing problems rather than merely improving existing solutions.
One lesson Onugha has learned from working across multiple markets is that scale is not universal. The challenges facing product teams in emerging economies differ significantly from those in more developed markets.
In countries like Nigeria, products must often solve more than the user’s immediate problem. Teams must navigate infrastructure gaps, payment challenges, inconsistent internet connectivity, and varying levels of digital literacy.
A payment product, for example, cannot focus exclusively on the transaction experience. It must also account for broader ecosystem constraints that influence adoption. In more mature markets such as the United Kingdom or North America, those foundational issues are often less pronounced. Instead, competition becomes the primary challenge.
“The infrastructure is already there,” he says. “The question becomes how you differentiate in highly saturated categories.”
This distinction matters because many startup playbooks are developed in environments very different from those in which African founders operate. Strategies that work in London or Silicon Valley may not translate directly to Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra. For African startups, scale often requires solving local constraints before pursuing global ambitions.
Another mistake product teams frequently make is treating scalability as a future problem. Many founders focus on launching quickly and postpone conversations around architecture, modularity, and infrastructure until later.
Onugha explains that this separation is artificial. Technical decisions made early in a product’s life often determine whether growth becomes sustainable.
“Engineering architecture becomes business architecture,” he says.
A poorly designed system may function adequately for a few thousand users but struggle under greater demand. Likewise, business models that create friction can undermine even the strongest products.
Pricing, packaging, monetisation, and distribution should not be viewed as secondary considerations. They are part of the product experience itself. In practice, this means designing for scale from the outset rather than treating it as something to solve after growth arrives.
Africa’s opportunity to think differently
As conversations around artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and startup funding continue to shape Africa’s technology ecosystem, Onugha remains optimistic about the continent’s future.
He points to Africa’s young population, growing technology communities, and increasing investment in digital infrastructure as reasons for confidence.
“Africa is a continent of untapped resources,” he says.
Across cities such as Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, Cape Town, and emerging technology hubs in places like Enugu and Imo State, he sees growing evidence of innovation and ambition. For him, the continent’s greatest advantage is not simply its population size but the potential of its people.
“There is a lot of room for growth,” he says. “If there’s critical investment in education, critical investment in technology, there will be an explosion of what Africans can do.”
The rise of artificial intelligence only adds to that opportunity. Rather than viewing new technologies as threats, he believes African founders, developers, and product leaders should see them as tools for creating new possibilities.
Ultimately, he notes that Africa’s next generation of successful technology companies will not emerge from copying existing models. They will emerge from understanding local realities, identifying overlooked opportunities, and building products that solve problems in ways others have not considered.
While incremental improvements lead to better products, category-defining thinking creates a lasting impact.
