Lessons from Scaling a Product to 1,500 Restaurants!!

When we started Orda Africa, we were building a point-of-sale system for restaurants. By the time I left, we were the operational backbone for over 1,500 restaurants across Nigeria.

Here’s what scaling that product taught me.

Speed Is a Feature

In African markets, the window to close a deal is shorter than you think. If your onboarding takes a week, you’ve lost the customer. We obsessed over time-to-value.

Hardware Is a Product Problem

We sourced hardware from Chinese OEMs, customised it for our use case, and distributed it at scale. Nobody told us this was a product problem — it just was. Product leaders who draw a line at software miss half the product.

The Team Is the Product

At 1,500 restaurants, what breaks first is usually the team, not the tech. Structure, communication, ownership — these are product problems too.

More to come on each of these.