Samson Kirigua

I help product teams in African markets find out why users drop off, and fix it before engineering spends time on the wrong thing.

Product design Nairobi, Kenya 13 years in design, 8 in product, across fintech, clean energy, logistics and marketplaces

About

I figure out what's actually broken and help teams fix the right thing.

Over the past eight years I've worked on marketplaces, fintech products, clean energy, logistics platforms and internal tools, mostly in situations where mistakes are expensive and users don't get second chances to trust you.

I've learned that d

I've learned that design is usually the straightforward part. The harder work is diagnosing why something isn't working. It might be a drop-off nobody can explain, a flow that's technically correct but useless to the people running it, or incentives that push users the wrong way. Then I get a cross-functional team to agree that's what we should fix first.

On a new project I do three things in order: find where users drop off, test with real people to learn why, then design the fix. Teams tend to bring me in when progress has stalled, or when a product needs to go from "it works" to "people actually use it."

I care about outcomes that hold up. At Sendy, that was a bank transfer payment method that reached a 90% success rate. At Jumba, I found out why nine in ten sellers left before listing anything, and rebuilt onboarding around their first sale.

on now is mobile-first, at scale, in markets where the infrastructure doesn't always cooperate.

Selected work

2026

D2E Growth Companion

Testing an AI growth coach with small business owners, and finding three launch blockers before any customer did.

View case study
2025

Jumba Connect Seller Onboarding

Nine in ten sellers dropped off before listing anything. I rebuilt onboarding around their first sale.

View case study
2024

Inventory Management Redesign

An internal tool had the right data but the wrong structure. I redesigned it around how operations teams actually work.

View case study
2023

Seller Storefront

Designing a self-checkout product sellers would trust enough to collect payments through — then watching it get shelved before launch.

View case study
2022

Pay by Bank Transfer

Introducing bank transfers as a payment method for Nigerian merchants who didn't trust card payments.

View case study
2021

Verification Platform

Replacing four separate onboarding tools with one centralized KYC system across four countries.

View case study

What people say

"I saw him grow from a visual designer to a product designer, then to a senior product designer, and finally to my manager as the Product Design Lead."

Denis Gachoki

Denis Gachoki

Product Designer

"His ability to communicate design decisions clearly and effectively has been crucial in driving project success."

Supreet Kumar

Supreet Kumar

Senior Design Manager, IBM | NID, CUA™, CXA™

Let's connect

Open to collaborations, product design opportunities, and consulting projects.