Learning to write software remains useful. The scarcer skill, as Adams Adeleke’s path from petroleum engineering through banking and fintech suggests, is knowing what ought to be built, for whom and why.
For some years, the advice to young Nigerians hoping to work in technology has been simple: learn to code. It is still good advice. It is no longer complete. Banks, payment firms and marketplaces need people who can write software. They also need people who can determine, with evidence, which problem is worth solving, which customer will pay and which idea should be stopped.
That second skill is product work. It rarely appears on undergraduate course lists. The career of Adams Gbolahan Adeleke, now heading product and business development at Scalex, a Nigerian crypto-to-fiat gateway, offers a practical illustration of how it can be acquired through experience.
He did not start in a computer science department. Adeleke graduated in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Ibadan in 2015. Between July 2016 and January 2018, he was a Graduate Business Analyst at Shell Nigeria Exploration and Production Company, mapping processes, testing whether changes were feasible and training people to use the resulting systems. The discipline was energy. The habit was gap analysis: what happens today, what needs to happen tomorrow and what sits between both.
In March 2018, he moved to Access Bank as a Product Manager Executive. The timing mattered. In March 2019, a Federal High Court sanctioned Access Bank’s combination with Diamond Bank, with the enlarged group launching its brand on 1 April. Adeleke’s documented assignment sat inside that integration, extracting, transforming and loading customer records so two institutions could operate as one while the bank continued to serve its customers.
Fintech came next. From January 2021 to January 2022, he worked on product development at Busha, a Nigerian cryptocurrency exchange, during a particularly demanding period for the industry. In February 2021, the Central Bank of Nigeria directed deposit money banks not to deal in cryptocurrency. Building products in that environment meant treating controls, onboarding and partner interfaces as part of the product rather than as an afterthought.
Since September 2021, Adeleke has been Head of Product and Business Development at Scalex. The role spans product strategy, partnerships and systems integration. The commercial problem is familiar in financial services: controls that are too weak expose a business to risk, while processes that are too cumbersome can drive legitimate customers away. His work has also involved application programming interfaces, allowing other businesses to connect to existing capabilities rather than rebuild them.
None of this makes coding unimportant. It does suggest, however, that the challenge for many businesses extends beyond finding people who can implement a specification.
Someone must first define the problem, understand the user, determine what evidence should influence the design and decide whether the proposed solution is worth the engineering effort.
Nigeria supplies no shortage of problems requiring that discipline. Payments fail, identity systems remain uneven and small merchants still struggle with aspects of digital commerce. Young graduates are routinely encouraged to acquire programming skills. They are less frequently taught the habit of testing an assumption with the people experiencing a problem before a line of code is written.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020, its latest full edition this June, estimated that by 2025 some 44 per cent of the skills workers need to perform their roles would change. Analytical thinking and innovation were among the capabilities expected to grow in importance. Those are product skills as much as they are technical skills, and importantly, they can travel across industries.
Adeleke’s path from a Shell graduate scheme through banking and into digital assets is therefore not an argument that young people should abandon what they studied. Rather, it shows how an engineering education can acquire wider value when analytical training is applied to different problems, industries and customer needs.
He has recently begun extending that thinking through Leenit, an education technology venture he co-founded in April to connect professionals who can teach with people seeking structured mentorship. The venture is still young. He has also been studying towards a master’s degree in Fintech and Business Analytics at the University of Westminster while continuing his role at Scalex.
For universities, employers and young Nigerians being pointed towards one technical certificate after another, the practical lesson is straightforward. Learn to build, but also learn to decide what deserves to be built, for whom and on what evidence. Adeleke’s career, as it stands in June 2022, offers one useful example of how those abilities can develop together.
