Two companies. Two functions built from scratch with no prior experience in either. Every time, the question was the same: how? The answer was always the same too: figure it out.
Prunedge
Prunedge is a technology agency headquartered in Lagos with businesses in Europe and the United States, serving both the public and private sectors. When I joined, there was no marketing team. There was no marketing strategy. There was no one who had done this before.
I had never worked in a marketing team. I had never built one. I took the role anyway, because I have never believed that a role is out of reach. The core of excelling at anything is being willing to find out how. So I found out.
The first thing I did was understand the business, who they served, what their competitors were doing, where the gaps were. I spent time mapping the market across four segments: public sector, private sector, talent, and international. I built buyer personas for each. I wrote the brand and content strategy from scratch. Then I executed it, alone, for nearly two years.
What I actually built
The Prunedge brand and content strategy covered market segmentation across public sector, private sector, talent, and international buyers. It mapped pain points by industry, from cybersecurity in fintech to data management in the public sector. It defined buyer personas, a competitor analysis that benchmarked Prunedge against Accenture, Infosys, and four other players in the space, content pillars, channels, and even a detailed equipment budget for video production. Benchmarking against Accenture as a first marketing hire with no prior experience was either audacious or naive. Probably both.
But writing the document was the easy part. Executing it alone, consistently, while figuring out what worked and what did not, for nearly two years, that was the work. The content went out. The channels grew. During that period, the company grew from under $300,000 in revenue to over $1 million. I cannot claim sole credit for a business result. But I can say the marketing function I built from scratch was the only structured marketing the company had during that growth.
I did not have a marketing background. I had a willingness to ask the right questions and a high tolerance for figuring things out. That turned out to be enough.
Content strategy, brand work, and channel execution built from scratch as the sole marketing hire.
Byte
Before Byte, design had been the foundation. I was hired on the spot by Victor Fatanmi after a pitch he may not even remember. I interned at FourthCanvas, one of Nigeria's most respected creative studios, where I learned directly from some of the best designers in the country. That training shaped everything that came after. When a graphic designer role at Byte appeared on LinkedIn, I recognised it immediately as a chance to see marketing from a design standpoint and design from a marketing standpoint at the same time.
I joined Byte as a graphic designer on the side, a way to return to design while keeping my marketing role at Prunedge. The first month was spent inheriting and understanding the brand, improving it daily. But an overhaul was inevitable. Redesigning Byte's identity system was the first real test of capability, openness, and leadership.
The process left no one out, from the newest intern to the oldest team member to Khalid, the 23-year-old CEO. Like every brand redesign, it was a test of patience, communication, and storytelling. After some back and forth, the team came together. The iconic B they landed on has survived every pivot the company has been through since. That is the real measure of a good brand identity, it holds through change.
Within three months I had led the rebrand and become close enough to the team that Khalid called one evening and made the case for going full time. I left Prunedge and joined Byte as Head of Operations Design.
The Byte brand identity redesign. The iconic B survived every pivot the company went through.
The "Design" in the title was there because I still had to overlap as a designer. But the core of the role was something I had never done before: building the culture and operational structure of an early-stage startup from scratch. No prior experience in operations. No playbook to follow.
I reached out to friends who had led operations before, Emmanuel Faith, Ore, Seun OG, paid attention to what leaders in my previous workplaces had done well and badly, and put it all together into something that worked for this specific team.
I prepared contracts, interviewed and onboarded talent, ran office hours, and organised team bonding activities. The difficult conversations mattered most, the ones that encouraged openness, named tensions early, and made it clear that people could say what was actually true. That is what emotional safety looks like in practice. Not a policy. Not a values document. Conversations that happen regularly enough that they become normal.
The relocation decision
One of the most consequential decisions at Byte was convincing the distributed team to come together physically in Yaba, Lagos. Richard came from Uyo. Victor E from Enugu. Khalid and Success from Abuja. Everyone in Lagos was already there. Kabir traveled from Ibadan every two weeks.
The result was their own version of a Silicon Valley moment, a team sleeping, eating, and working in the same space. No "can you hear me?" across Zoom calls. Features shipped in 24 hours from ideation to implementation. Joel's Egusi soup. Khalid's noodles and fried eggs at midnight. Team bonding was not a quarterly event. It was every day.
The culture I helped build gave the company clarity, speed, and the stability that made it attractive to investors. 100% talent retention for over 18 months is not an accident. It is what happens when people feel safe, seen, and moving toward something worth building.
The Byte team in Yaba during the in-person sprint. Building, living, and working in the same space.
What the role actually looked like
One moment: preparing contracts and onboarding new talent. The next: researching the product offering or talking to customers. Then giving brand direction, running a team bonding session, or designing marketing materials and going to print them. Operations at an early-stage startup is not a defined role. It is whatever the company needs that nobody else is doing.
Eventually the business stabilised, the team grew in numbers and structure, and the role evolved. Head of Operations Design became Head of Design. By the time I left, the operations structure I had built was running without daily intervention and the design team had grown into something formidable.
I spent three years at Byte. It was the most complete professional experience I have had: designer, operator, marketer, culture builder, and eventually partner. I left having built more than a function. I left having helped build a company.
What was left behind
At Prunedge, I left a marketing function that had not existed before I arrived. The strategy document, the content pillars, the channels, the brand positioning, all of it was built from nothing and left standing when I moved on.
At Byte, I left a culture. The difficult conversations, the team bonding, the contracts and onboarding processes, the relocation to Yaba, the brand identity that survived every pivot. The 100% talent retention was not a stat from my tenure alone. It was what happened because the foundation was right. That is the most honest measure of whether an operations person did their job.
What I learned