OLX (Naspers)

Overview

This was my first product role, even though my title was Category Manager for Real Estate at OLX.

I acted as the link between OLX, Property24, and the Nigerian Institution of Estate Surveyors and Valuers (NIESV) to build a trusted real estate portal for Nigeria. I owned the product vision and roadmap, working closely with stakeholders, engineering, and product design to take the product from concept to its first working version.

It was a true zero-to-one build.

The Problem

In the early 2010s, Nigeria’s real estate market had very little regulation. Online property fraud was common, and buyers and renters did not trust digital property listings.

Through user interviews, we identified several key problems:

• The same property was often listed by several agents

• Buyers could not tell which agents were genuine

• Trusted agents avoided online portals because they did not trust them

• Offline property marketing was becoming expensive

• There was no reliable record of property prices across Nigeria

The core problem was trust.

The Opportunity

The fastest way to build trust was to work with an authority the market already respected.

NIESV was a professional body for estate agents in Nigeria, with more than 10,000 members. By building the portal around verified NIESV members, we could create a safer way for buyers, renters, and agents to connect.

My Role

I led the product from a blank page to the first working version.

I shaped the product vision, managed the roadmap, gathered user insight, aligned stakeholders, and worked closely with engineering and design to turn the idea into a usable platform.

What We Built

1. Verified agent listings

We created a portal where NIESV members could list properties, while agents outside the body were vetted before they could join.

This gave buyers and renters a safer place to search and gave trusted agents more confidence to list online.

2. Cleaner property listings

Duplicate listings were a major source of frustration.

We added moderation to remove duplicates and introduced a reporting system managed by the NIESV team, helping users trust the listings they saw.

3. A property price data foundation

To start building a record of real property prices, we created a simple form agents completed after a property was sold or rented.

Over time, this helped create a growing record of property prices by region.

Outcomes

The verified model helped change how people used the platform.

Key results included:

• 40% growth in legitimate listings

• Sharp drop in property fraud on the platform

• 25% month-on-month growth in mobile app usage

• Increased trust among buyers, renters, and verified agents

• A new data foundation for property prices by region

What This Shows

This project taught me what product management really is.

The most important metric was not traffic or volume. It was whether the platform solved the trust problem.

That meant tracking genuine listings, fraud reduction, user engagement, and the quality of leads agents could act on.

It also taught me that the right partner can solve a problem no feature can fix alone. In this case, trust was the product, and every product decision had to support it.