African investors read cap tables well. Ayomide Onasanya thinks that investors need a new competence – the ability to read a product properly. The Acumen Digital founder spent the earlier years of his career on the product design and engineering side of the table before transitioning to the venture building and investment side of the startup ecosystem. Lately, he has been arguing that “…a demo which doesn’t crash isn’t due diligence”. We sat down with him to unpack why.  It will be worth noting that this will be a slightly technical conversation but we have done quite a bit  to  keep it relevant for the everyday business and technology reader. Hope you enjoy this conversation just as much as you learn from it.

You have been speaking about product quality stating that it needs a seat in an investment committee. Where does it currently rank and why is it important?

Product quality checks rank near the bottom in investment conversations. They are often squeezed into a demo during pitch week. VCs are more often excel-first type of people. Trained to read TAM, ARR, LTV to CAC. Product gets sidelined because most investors lack a product-evaluation competence (and understandably so). In the African tech  market, where trust is paper-thin, UX isn’t polish, it is an operational requirement. When investors treat it as an afterthought, they often end up funding startups that leak users months after a great top-of-funnel quarter.

What does putting product judgment in the room look like in practice?

I think that this starts with product literacy and product evaluation capability development. They are learnable skills. When investors become more product-literate, it becomes easy to see why we  should not commence a product evaluation session with questions like “what did you build?” but “how does this product’s friction align with real user problems and the end users’ real behaviour?.” Before a term sheet is signed, run a product stress test alongside the financial stress test. What is the time-to-value for a first-time user? How gracefully does it fail when a network drops? Is churn happening because people don’t need this, or because it frustrates them? Without that, you’re writing checks against vanity metrics.

What do the early product decisions behind Paystack, Flutterwave, Moniepoint, and OPay tell us that their funding rounds don’t?

See. Funding news tells you when investors buy into the business and it also tells you when capital arrives. Product decisions really show you why these companies survived and why they continue to be relevant even today. See. Paystack’s product engineering focused on developer experience, not just payment rails. Flutterwave nailed multi-border orchestration early. Moniepoint bet that offline reliability mattered more to merchants than a sleek app. OPay understood distribution velocity. None of that was accidental. It was a deliberate call focused intentionally where friction had to disappear and where reliability was non-negotiable. Funding fuels scale. Product architecture and practical follow-through is what makes that scale defensible.

Paystack is often credited with winning on developer experience. What does that tell investors about where fintech retention is actually decided?

I think this tells us that your real end-user isn’t always the person signing the contract. Sometimes, it is the developer implementing your SDK at 2 a.m. Because think about it: before Paystack, integrating payments in Nigeria took weeks of paperwork. Paystack turned that into minutes – that teaches us that for that particular season of the market’s product experience, developer delight showed  to be a sticky retention factor. Once an engineer writes your API into their codebase, switching becomes a real headache. These things are not won with sales calls, they are won at the point of integration when the sales team is unavailable and honestly not even required for a favorable decision to be made regarding your product).

OPay scaled hard on distribution and incentives. Does that complicate or prove the UX-as-a-retention-lever argument?

I think that it actually proves it. Subsidies and discount offers get people through the door; UX decides if they stay once the money runs out. The moment subsidies taper, behaviour reverts to whatever is more convenient, and a clunky app gets dumped. Acquisition does a great job of hiding a flawed product temporarily. Experience seals the back door (essentially ensuring retention).

If product quality alone decided a term sheet, what would you look at?

That’s a tough one to summarize (laughs) I would look at a few key things such as the number of steps to a user’s first real “aha” moment, things like how the app handles an error, what a generic crash screen versus a clear next step look like, I’ll look into the product’s velocity (how fast a team ships fixes based on real feedback) among other indicators. A fast team can fix a mediocre product. A slow one lets a good product decay.

Why is UX a sharper retention lever in African fintech specifically?

In developed markets, trust in banks was built over a century, so a clunky app gets forgiven. In Africa, the interface is the institution. If it feels laggy or confusing, the assumption isn’t buggy. It is quickly interpreted as unsafe. UX carries the a huge weight of institutional trust here in the African market.

What’s the practical fix? One thing an investor could start doing this quarter?

Stop letting founders drive the demo. Take the phone yourself. Onboard as a clueless user. wrong details, dead data mid-transaction etc and watch where you get stuck. Ten minutes tells you more than a thirty-page deck.

Is product judgment learnable, or does it need someone like you in the room permanently?

Yes it is actually. That is one of the things that I said at the start of this interview. Product literacy and evaluation skills are learnable. Just as investors learned to read financial statements and balance sheets without becoming accountants, deep judgment (scalability trade-offs, edge-case resilience) takes years in the trenches to develop. But they sure are learnable skills. That is clearly a case for the venture studio model: it supports viable and  properly positioned products.

Ten years from now, if this argument around Product Judgement wins, what changes?

I think that it will have a net positive ripple effect on the ecosystem. Capital will get more efficient, we stop funding pitch-deck storytellers burning cash on noisy growth while shipping broken products, and start backing builders who earn trust from day one. African tech stops being known just for big numbers and starts being known for resilient products  that hold up strong and serve the market on a continually improving basis. It will lead to a more mature ecosystem and market altogether.

Ayomide Onasanya is the founder of a venture studio – Acumen Venture Studios. He often writers about product development, venture building, investment in the intersection of technology, product development,