A year of painting browsers, shipping campaigns, and figuring out what ownership really means
12 Months at Chowdeck
I’m in Johannesburg. Winter. Freezing. On a Google Meet with Femi, Lamina and Olumide, the people who would eventually become my colleagues. I’m visibly shaking on camera. They pause and ask if I’m comfortable. I had to explain. It’s not nerves, I promise. It’s the cold. I’m still adjusting. That was my first impression on the Chowdeck team. Shivering in South Africa, about to yap about the wrong features.
Because NGL, I had not used Chowdeck extensively before the call. So much so that when they asked what my favourite feature was, I jumped on the delivery note feature, mostly because it was one I loved using on UberEats in SA. Deliveries came right to my door. I was explaining with so much passion… lmmaaaaoooooo. You had to see the look on their faces like what is this dude yapping about. Don’t try me now ooo!! features too choke!!! (Give me Group checkout, Chowpass, add some Live tracking and lets throw in multiple order delivery). The chat still felt more conversational and vibe checky though, and I appreciated that. Maybe the fact that I wasn’t even in the country added to my steezze… lol!!
In the early days of June 2025, I had booked an Ethiopian Airlines flight headed to Johannesburg, South Africa, to rest my head, see what life is outside Nigeria, and get a change of scenery. It was winter in South Africa, my first winter, and boy! was it cold. I had to get to the store that morning to get new clothes: jackets, thermal socks, neck warmer, gloves, because no way was I gonna die of cold.
I was contracted to Mira as a Frontend Engineer where I took on the moniker “Saitama” (a character from the popular TV series One Punch Man). If you know the show, you know why. I was carrying all the frontend responsibilities alone, one punch at a time, until Timi joined and we finally had a team. Ted still struggles to call me Seun till today. At Mira I was focused on delivering the best customer experiences: micro interactions, user interfaces for products like Link, online ordering, and much later Kitchen (the merchant dashboard that’s now Chowdeck’s Vendor Dashboard). I was trusted by Ted Oladele, a man known not just for his attention to detail but his levels for delivering on excellence. He’s VP of Design at Flutterwave, and he didn’t get there by having low standards. We connected from our first call and I was already building out screens the next couple of days.
We went on to work on amazing features across our suite of products, most especially Mira Retail, a feature that had us locked fucking in for two weeks in an apartment in Lekki, building and crafting every detail with care, searching for new knowledge, testing and breaking things. We still didn’t meet the deadline until a few months later.
Then on one of our team calls, Ted and Seike (best in COO) dropped the news: Mira had been acquired by Chowdeck. What the next couple of weeks would look like headed into July was that we were to wake up as staff of Chowdeck. It all felt like a movie. And if you know me well, I’m the guy that lets the show go on and figures it out as he goes.
Its July 2025. A bunch of us termed “Mira boys” joined Chowdeck. First stop was the office to meet the team before heading to Lakowe for the company’s H2 2025 offsite.
I can still remember that day, parked outside the office, not sure if I should even enter. How the hell am I supposed to introduce myself? “Hey it’s Seun, one of the engineers from Mira?” Boy, ain’t no way! I just stayed, waited for Timi Omoyeni, and we started our 2-hour drive to Lakowe. Timi was just there being a passenger princess… what a guy!
Arrived Lakowe, found out I was pairing with Dami (agba frontend engineer) who had been holding the fort alone for so long. Dami was chilled. He made me comfortable right away while giving me a heads up on how fast life gets after the offsite. But little did he know I’m also built like that. We spoke about things he had built and the current challenges, and it was a relief knowing he had extra hands on the frontend team. Emi ika! idan gan gan! Bring the tasks, we go run am seh!
I’ll spare you the details of the offsite. But take my word for it: the assumption that Mira boys were gym rats who looked intimidating changed on the last day. Yes we work hard, we put in the grind. But like our leader (Ted), we sure know how to party too!
New week. Thrown into the deep end. How I love it. There was onboarding across different teams, stakeholders, and departments, but on the engineering side it wasn’t lengthy, and honestly I preferred it that way. I backed myself to go in, figure it out and get moving. Bring me those tickets, let’s cook!
While at it, I also took on a bunch of customer support tickets: talking to customers, resolving late deliveries, missing items, wrong orders, among other issues. I even did a couple of deliveries myself, mostly on weekends. It was interesting seeing customers’ reactions to me showing up with their food in my own car. One customer actually said he thought it was a prank, but he just decided to go with the flow until I arrived. It was nice doing this because I got to understand how something as small as a tiny detail missed, a bad UX choice, a minute delay, a downtime, or a bad code push could snowball into a chain reaction: a flood of support tickets, angry customers, and the whole system overwhelmed. That experience came in handy later when I built an internal tool for the operations team called Clarity. I ended up relying on it a lot myself too, to monitor orders during those delivery runs.
I was assigned to the internal tools team. Internal tools team? What’s happening there? NGL this was the best thing that could have happened to me. Joining a team of superstars, in every sense of the word, from PMs, to designers, to engineers, to marketing (do not even fucking play here! Shout out to Damian and his team), to Sales (Kennedy will sell you anything! Just make it work).
In the internal tools team I had the opportunity to work on high impact features where my users and customers were internal staff: support, zonal managers, coordinators, and a host of other stakeholders. I got to work with Gloria, Rue, Jerome (if you are currently working with me, do not be jealous, they are my first love at Chowdeck). We were a small cross functional team responsible for making sure every stakeholder had the operational tools to get work done, shipping new internal products and continuously improving existing ones ( backlog was never empty, feature requests were steady coming in). Dare I say I had so much fun there. We built what has been termed the best dashboard in Chowdeck 🙂↔️, we revamped discounts creation to dead simple (a system that had you dependent on one engineer before you could create a discount), and so much more!
If that was not enough, the whole company put their trust in me to deliver the Big Black Friday Campaign.
I was on my way from the office, dropping off Timi at his house. I’m on the express, phone rings. Eh? Ted? 6pm? Tuesday? Does quick maths. I didn’t push anything that could break production. Picks up.
Ted: How far where you dey? You fit join call? Femi dey find you
Me: Me ke? What did I do? 🤣🤣🤣
Ted: No worry just join.
Now I’m in a private meeting. Everybody is blowing pidgin! Ah yes! Everywhere stew! Everywhere semo! No shaking!!! Femi says: Seun, we want to build our biggest black friday website and everyone says it’s you that can do it. Me ke? But as omo naija, dey with me! Mafo!! My only response was: when does design land? Dollars says phase one Thursday, phase two by Monday. I said calm!
Boy, we delivered. Thanks to Ted, Dollars, Lamina, Okeke (our resident sound engineer), Demola, Olumide. We did such an amazing job that the cross functional team that was formed won an award at the EOYP. We cooked and we ate. So much so that this tweet by my guy was a whole discussion 🤣🤣🤣 (Lanre please be careful). Our BFCM website got an Honorable Mention on Awwwards. You can read more about it here.
Headed into February, another campaign! Boy was I assigned before I could say Jack Robinson! But if you’ve read up to this point you already know the vibes. Bring am! Na my food!
Valentine’s campaign was a success thanks to Chidinma, Demola and Jerome. Building the love wall was so much fun. We had to worry about a lot of variables, until Nigerians showed us that you can build what you want and they’ll use it how they like. Users were posting notes cursing out other people, quoting and replying each other. It was so funny, yet interesting. A real learnable moment. We rushed to resolve it by filtering for words and censoring a bunch of posts. No way were we going to let that kill such a cute feature. I still go there to relive some moments.
Ah, almost forgot! You can check your personality type here too, another lovely feature from the marketing team. It works like magic. Do take the quiz, I’d like to see your results.
The first half of this year has seen me leave the internal tools team for a more public-facing marketplace team. Shaping new experiences, new products, entering new markets, adding more verticals, and touching more lives, one merchant, one customer, one internal user at a time. All while having fun at it.
On the marketplace team, something shifted for me. I raised two PRDs, proper product requirement documents, not just ideas thrown in a Slack thread. The first was rethinking how we surface food options to customers, pushing for a more intelligent recommendation approach built around different criteria. The second was tackling a pain point that had been quietly hurting customers for a while: orders that weren’t picked up, sitting in limbo for up to an hour before being auto-cancelled. An hour. The customer has waited, the rider has made the trip down to the vendor for nothing, time and resources burned that could have gone elsewhere. I pushed for a better way. Both PRDs got positive feedback and are being implemented. I’m not going to lie, that meant a lot. It confirmed that you don’t have to be at a company for years before your voice carries weight. Show up, think deeply, and people will listen.
This year also taught me what it really means to own something. Not just shipping the feature, but staying close enough after launch to catch a problem before a user has to report it. Keeping every stakeholder in the loop, not just the engineers. Pushing back when a technical call, a design choice, or even a stray comment doesn’t actually serve the people using the product. That’s the standard I hold myself to now. Can’t unknow it.
It’s a different kind of weight being on a team that touches what users actually see and feel every day. The stakes are higher, the surface area is wider, and honestly, I love it. Working with this amazing set of people cannot be explained. You have to experience it because truly it’s an experience, it’s a vibe. I’m so lucky to be part of the team pushing the boundaries on logistics in Africa: food deliveries, package deliveries, and so much more (I won’t spill the beans on the new products or features).
To Femi, Olumide, Okeke, Demola, Ted, Rue, Timi, Lamina, Dami, Ralph, Gloria, Damian, Cheechodess, Fiyi, Fela,Valentine, Dollars, Jerome, Sauban, Victor, Tomilola, Rukky, Obasola, Feyi, Azula, Bukola, Foluso, Adeola (legal, illegal) and the rest of the team : you guys made this an easy journey. Didn’t feel like 12 months. Felt like we were just getting started.
Cheers to Chapter 2. I’m ready for whatever lands next, side-eyeing Damian and Dollars already for the new campaigns.
PS: special shout to Timi, that’s him dancing right in front of me in that photo. The guy who put me on for the Mira job back in the day, the reason I’m even here writing this today.