Digital Student Wallet System

This project was a digital student payment system, a student wallet, for Nigerian secondary schools. I served as Product & Project Manager. The case study covers the phase that decides whether a product succeeds: the discovery and strategy work done before the first line of code and how it shaped what the team built.

• Heavy dependence on physical cash in schools, students face loss, theft or extortion.

• Fragmented payment systems across schools: manual cash, POS, transfers, notebooks, WhatsApp confirmations.

• Parents send cash blindly, with no visibility into student spending

• Discovery: I defined the business problem, requirements, user needs, and success criteria with the founder and client.

• Research: I ran surveys, interviewed students and parents, analysed online data, and reviewed competitors.

• Strategy: I found the market gap and shaped the product vision, positioning, target segment, and selling points around the research findings and the founder’s and client’s business goals.

• Product shaping: I mapped user journeys, chose a mobile-first design with a web presence, and prioritised features.

• Business planning: I contributed to the business model, go-to-market strategy, and phased roadmap.

• Alignment: I presented to stakeholders, took their feedback, and revised the PRD.

• Requirements: I turned business needs into user stories and acceptance criteria, and broke features down with the engineering lead.

• Validation: I ran iterative reviews and gathered stakeholder and user feedback, including user acceptance testing, to find and make improvements.

During product planning for a digital student wallet, some requirements for user permissions and transaction controls were unclear as we defined the PRD and user journeys. I returned to the business stakeholders to clarify the expected user experience and business rules, then refined the relevant user stories and acceptance criteria. I communicated the clarified requirements to the technical lead and worked with them to ensure the features were properly understood and prioritized in the product backlog before development began.

• Established clearer product requirements and aligned business expectations with technical planning ahead of development.

• Rollout is ongoing, and I’ll add results as they become measurable

Discovery done well prevents building the wrong thing.