Community safety reporting platform for tricycle riders
Tricycle riders in Nigeria had no shared, real-time source of safety information. Checkpoints, accidents and road hazards were discovered one rider at a time. The platform needed riders to report and follow incidents live, pay for itself through sponsored listings, and run without a dedicated engineering team.
- My role
- Tech Lead - sole engineer, architecture and business decisions
- Team
- Solo
- Timeline
- 3 months to production
- Constraint
- Sponsored content had to fund the platform without making riders stop trusting the safety feed
The problem
The platform had two feeds with different jobs: a home feed for priority notices and alerts, and a community feed for posts, questions and incident reports. Both carried sponsored content. The hard part was adding commercial content to a safety feed without riders tuning it out or losing trust in what they read.
Too many sponsored posts and the feed feels like a billboard; too few and the business doesn't work. There was no product manager to hand this to, so I designed the rule, built it and owned the outcome.
The tradeoff I made
I placed sponsored posts with simple, fixed rules instead of an engagement-based algorithm. An algorithm might have earned more impressions, but on a safety platform I wanted to know exactly what a rider would see and in what order. Fixed rules are less optimal commercially but completely predictable.
A predictable, trustworthy feed over maximised ad revenue.
Outcomes
Feed systems built - a home feed for priority notices and a community feed for posts, questions and incident reports
Complete platform delivered solo - API, authentication, feeds, sponsored content, admin, public pages, SEO, monitoring and deployment
Engineer - every architecture decision, business rule, UI and infrastructure choice owned end to end
What I would do differently
I would add analytics to the sponsored content from day one. I set the rules on judgment, with no data on whether riders skipped or engaged with sponsored posts. Basic tracking of scroll depth and sponsored post interactions would have turned an opinion into a decision.