African Puzzle
Design leadership and product ownership for a personal assistant app serving artisans, creatives, and entrepreneurs across 70 countries.
Background & Overview
Most productivity tools are built for office workers in corporate environments. They assume laptops, calendars, email threads, and Slack channels. But there’s a massive population of working people — artisans, tailors, creatives, entrepreneurs — whose professional lives don’t look anything like that. Their workflows are tactile, relationship-driven, and deeply personal. They deserve tools that meet them where they are.
African Puzzle is a personal assistant app designed specifically for these users. As Design Lead and Product Owner, I shaped the product from the ground up: defining what it should be, how it should work, and why it matters.
The Problem
Creative professionals and small business owners across Africa and its diaspora manage projects, clients, and schedules using tools that were never designed for the way they work. The gap isn't a missing feature — it's a missing perspective.
Designing around how people actually work.
The app is organized around four concepts: PROGRAMMES for consolidating project details in one place, CLIENTS for quick-reference customer profiles, ALBUM for grouping work by theme, and RENDEZ-VOUS for managing appointments with built-in reminders. The naming is deliberate — rooted in the linguistic and cultural context of the user base, not borrowed from Silicon Valley convention.
Every design decision started with the same question: does this reflect how these users think about their work, or are we imposing a pattern from somewhere else? Enterprise project management tools break work into tickets and sprints. That framework means nothing to a tailor managing commissions or an artisan coordinating materials and delivery across borders.
My Process
Wearing both the design and product hats meant moving between research, strategy, and execution constantly. I defined the product vision, led user research across multiple markets, designed the interface, and guided the app through to beta launch — making the hard calls about what to build first and what to leave for later.
Resisting the defaults.
It would have been easy to start with a project management template and skin it for a new audience. But the whole point was to resist that impulse. The interface needed to feel intuitive to someone who has never used Asana or Trello — and might not want to. Simplicity wasn’t a constraint; it was the product strategy. Make your clients happy. Save time. Be more efficient. Nothing more, nothing less.
The Outcome
African Puzzle is live at africanpuzzle.com and available in beta on Google Play across 70 countries. The product continues to evolve based on user feedback, but the foundation — a tool that respects its users’ reality — is solid.
Like what you see?
Don’t hesitate to reach out so we can chat about working on a project together.