Step 01 — Discovery
Understanding the landscape before touching the product.
Before scoping a single feature, I spent time embedded with the users — government finance officers, MDA cashiers, and central bank liaisons across Liberia and Sierra Leone. I conducted structured interviews, shadowed existing payment workflows, and analysed failure logs from the legacy system.
What I found wasn't a technology problem. The existing infrastructure was adequate. The real issues were trust, habit, and institutional resistance. Government staff had been managing payments manually for years. The risk wasn't that CPay wouldn't work — it was that it would work and nobody would use it.
"The biggest discovery insight: the people who processed payments weren't afraid of the technology. They were afraid of accountability. Digital payments created an audit trail their manual systems didn't."
I also mapped the external landscape — competing internal systems, political sensitivities between MDAs, and the compliance requirements tied to World Bank funding conditions. This informed both the product scope and the stakeholder engagement strategy.