Recently, I was Head of Design for a chain of computerized maintenance management products at Sysserve, where I led product strategy and design at every scale and stage of development and turned the tide around on customer adoption, retention, and recommendations to get the company from crawling to growing at a fast pace of over 50% year on year on revenue and profit.
I did this by reviewing, recommending, defining, and designing the structure, function, user experience, and identity for seven enterprise products for both web and mobile platforms. I also defined and designed the corporate identity and messaging of the business.
Before Sysserve, I led UX design at Dealdey, the first e-commerce platform in Nigeria, where I also functioned as a creative director, and led a cross-functional team of designers, content writers, sales representatives, BI personnel, and social media marketers to reimagine the business strategy, brand, and core product offering.
I thrive more in a work environment that promotes work-life balance, collaboration, diversity, inclusivity, and FREEDOM.
My core values are Excellence(paying attention to tiny details), Integrity, Commitment, Respect, and Diligence.
I believe the world revolves around humans - my family, my friends, my teammates, my users, my neighbors, and the whole human race - hence, enabling people to thrive is the ultimate goal of my work.
I am passionate about finding simple and elegant ways to solve complex and hopeless problems for human beings.
Consequently, I am strongly attracted to any opportunity to help drive useful and valuable innovations and participate in creative activities, that integrate teamwork and experience with design principles, heuristics, and information.
I write songs and sing a lot, and I love to play the guitar and keyboards.
I walk for an average of 10km daily and ride on Spotify at work, but above all, I love to hang out with friends and teammates on the beach, in bars, in the cinema, or at our houses.
I feel grateful to be husband to a wonderful woman and dad to three happy boys.
From Agriculture and Healthcare to eCommerce, Finance, Logistics, Education, and large-scale maintenance management systems, with limited resources and with abundance, I’ve worked in challenging environments, with outstanding cross-functional teammates to create digital products, features, and experiences that improved people's lives and established both short and long term business advantages.
Throughout my career, mentored and supported my teammates and colleagues, sharing new tools and methods that fine tuned product development practice, helped younger designers grow, and unlocked product growth.
Product Discovery & Innovation
From research and strategy to high-fidelity deliverables, and everything between
Quantitative research
Qualitative research
IA
UX
IxD
UI
Visual design
Design systems
Usability
Communication & Storytelling
Crafting stories and spreading memorable ideas to educate and inspire
Writing
Branding
Visual ID
Messaging
Print design
Creative directing
Copywriting
Advertisement
Video editing
Skill Development & Mentorship
Training and resources to help cross-functional teams do their best work
Mentoring
Training
Methods
Tooling
Materials
Hangouts
Seminars
Edukoya
Product Design Lead
Sysserve
Product Design Lead + Head Of Design
DESIGN DIRECTOR
Dealdey
UX Design Lead + Creative Director
LidStack
2015 - 2019
Product designer
As a senior product designer, Samuel has consistently exceeded expectations and delivered exceptional results on every project he has led. I worked with him at Edukoya. His exceptional creativity, attention to detail, and strong understanding of user experience make him a valuable asset to any team. His ability to translate complex design concepts into intuitive and aesthetically pleasing products is truly impressive.
Omolade Odetare
Product owner
Leanspace.io
Sammy is very hard-working and pays excellent attention to details.
Anthony Ogundipe
SENIOR software engineer
SeamlessHR
I had the pleasure of working with Sam as a member of my team at Edukoya. In his role as a product design leader, Sam consistently impressed me with his intelligence and ability to challenge the status quo, viewing design from a unique perspective, and bringing a fresh and innovative approach to every project. His solutions are always creative and effective.
A strong leader, able to inspire and motivate his team members to achieve their best work. He had this natural ability to build strong working relationships with cross-functional partners at Edukoya. I highly recommend Sam for any product design leadership role.
Victory Matibiri
Product Advisor
411Gen
The entire team and management of Muva Innovations Ltd and Shoproom Ltd especially thank Samuel for his superb and excellent work delivery. Though, at first, we didn’t quite understand his intuitive questioning of our design concept, it ended up helping us fine-tune grey areas in our concept. Working with him was smooth and very productive.
Helen Ekwoaba
COO And Co-founder
Muva Innovations
Samuel is a product designer who pays great attention to product details with a strong focus on solving user problems in delivering the best possible experience.
Jerry Okebgue
CEO And Co-founder
Sysserve
Implementing Samuel's work forces you to think of the "whys" and understand the meaning behind every single pixel. You are forced to focus on both the graphical correctness of what you are building as well as delivering the best user experience possible. I called him Mr 1 pixel.
Ikechukuw Ekwe
Senior frontend engineer
Sysserve
Samuel Anwakang, is first a creative professional before anything else. I worked with him on a project and I haven’t let him go since, his work ethics are admirable, second to none I have ever experienced before.
He would give advice that would inadvertently birth new ideas, and deliver any project before due dates, the warmness of his spirit is contagious and safe.
I am a fan.
Chidebere Onwuzurike
Ceo and co-founder
Dexter Technologies
Samuel’s superpower as a designer is his attention to detail and ownership of the problem. He is a fantastic design leader - continually going above and beyond for the customer, his team, and the business. A rare find for every customer-centric ambitious team.
In my experience
Ayomide Aregbede
SENIOR software engineer
Community.com
Don Norman
I'm not ashamed to say that NNgroup.com is my design bible. From heuristics to principles and methods, they provide me with the most comprehensive repository of human-centered thinking resources on the internet.
I admire Google's design systems, patterns, and standards. I have based some of my most successful design projects on them.
The one thing that stands out to me with Google apps and websites is that they make things clear, legible, organized, understandable, and reachable.
And they are consistent with it. I love it
Canva
Canva is a design platform with a big heart.
They empower everyone, regardless of design experience, to create professional-looking designs.
Canva is the first product I have seen that was designed with a mother's instincts - to carry everyone along.
Steve Kruge
Kruger's thoughts and non-conformist attitude to paradigms significantly fed my critical thinking tendencies.
Apple
I admire Apple's excellent attitude.
Have you noticed that when you use a MacBook or an iPhone, the system just gets out of your way? Cool right?
But there's one more key experience I've had interacting with Apple products: They have tried to anticipate even the most insignificant of my intents and prepared for me. Impressive!
They inspired me to think more deeply and slowly about my users' journeys.
For me, WhatsApp is the icon of design simplicity. Even the most illiterate in Africa could use it with very little learning. All they had to know was what you already knew: Texting. I admire that.
Forget all these other stuff that came later, including Meta.
WhatsApp has been a major standard for some of the most successful communication features I have designed for enterprise software(where UX is usually not valued).
Amy Jo Kim
Was introduced to Amy by my former CPO at Edukoya when we were trying to define our 14-day customer journey map. What I learned from listening to her has helped me approximate closer to getting things right at the beginning. Been following her since then.
Tony Ulwik
Tony's JTBD and ODI approach to product discovery is Key to how I evaluate products and features I have to build. He has literally removed the BS and guess work from design thinking and innovation.
Bolt App
Uber had a whole year's head start in Nigeria, yet lost to Bolt, due to bad UX design. (I wrote about this on Medium).
Bolt taught me 2 lessons:
knowing your users before designing anything.
If you are located in an advanced part of the world, but want to to sell to the entire world, employ a very geographically divers team to balance your user expectations for those regions. Uber thought the whole world was California.