Operating at scale
AfyaRekod
The brief looked like "make it scale." The actual work was designing the operating system.
- Client
- AfyaRekod
- Role
- General Manager, Product & Operations
- Year
- 2020 to 2023
AFYAREKOD · 2020 TO 2023
One operating system, five markets.
Took an early-stage African healthtech from a small team to a multi-country operation. The brief looked like "make it scale." The actual work was designing the operating system that let a 40-person team ship three platforms coherently across five markets without losing the plot.
The three platforms on one spine: a patient portal where people own and carry their records, a facility suite spanning EHR, pharmacy, diagnostics and insurance workflows, and a public health layer for disease surveillance and vaccine programmes. Together they served 100,000+ patients and 100+ healthcare facilities across Kenya and Nigeria.
Health infrastructure gets built county by county, hospital by hospital, USSD menu by USSD menu. I was in those rooms. I know what the wifi does at the exact moment the demo matters.
I also learned what systems cost the people inside them. That lesson took longer, and it is the reason for everything since.
Innovation without operations is just hallucination. The point was never the demo; the point was the system that survived without me.
What the work was
- Led the end-to-end launch and scale of three digital health platforms used by patients, clinics, and public health systems
- Owned product prioritization across all three, trading off regulatory compliance, delivery speed, and clinical risk during multi-country launches
- Worked directly with designers and engineers on user flows, data models, and edge-case logic for patient and institution workflows
- Stood up HMIS, USSD, and clinical workflows designed for low-bandwidth contexts
- Built and led a 40+ person team across five countries, aligning execution to company strategy and OKRs
- Designed pricing, partnership, and commercial models balancing impact with financial sustainability
- Built multi-tenant platform architecture supporting different national health regulations
- Led high-risk health data migrations and system rollouts with zero service disruption
- Closed raises totalling $2M+, partnered with ministries and hospital networks