By Nelson LeramahNigerian companies are burning engineering budget rebuilding the same product with a different logo and calling it growth.
A company signs its twelfth distribution partner with a bank, merchant network or agent network, and everyone sees it as good news. Sales has been chasing the deal for two quarters, it has finally come through, and the partner wants to go live before month-end.
Engineering does the sums and comes back with four to six weeks. Meanwhile, the product already exists and the company has launched similar apps many times before. But because earlier partners took about the same time, nobody finds the timeline strange. The date moves and the partner waits.
This happens constantly across Nigerian fintech and retail. Each branded app gets launched, so from the outside it looks like growth. Inside the business however, engineering time and budget are being spent again on work already paid for through another codebase, testing round and release cycle.
That is the problem. Companies that build branded apps for distribution partners keep treating each new app as another project when, after a certain point, it should become another version of something they already know how to build.
