Step 01 — Context & Mandate
An API-first platform needs a product manager who can think in endpoints, schemas, and ecosystems.
Pierflow is positioned as the connectivity layer for healthcare in Africa — an interoperable network where hospitals, payers, suppliers, and patients can exchange data through a single, standardised API surface. Built in Lagos, designed for West Africa, modelled on the developer-platform DNA of companies like Stripe and Twilio.
The mandate when I joined was clear: every part of the product is an API. Every workflow has a developer-readable contract. Every partnership is a technical integration, not a slide deck. My job was to own that surface — the documentation, the schemas, the versioning, the developer experience — and translate it into commercial traction with the institutions that move African healthcare.
African healthcare is fragmented by design. Every hospital runs its own HMS. Every HMO uses its own claims schema. Every supplier has its own catalogue. Pierflow's thesis is that the network effect comes from standardising the connectivity, not the systems.
Core stack: FHIR R4, REST APIs, OAuth 2.0, multimodal LLMs (Claude and GPT-4o), OCR fallback chains, OpenCV-based image enhancement, NDPR-compliant data handling. The platform speaks the international standards (FHIR, ICD-10, LOINC, ATC) but is tuned to the realities of how data actually moves in Nigerian hospitals — paper, scans, WhatsApp, fragmented spreadsheets, and inconsistent identifiers.