Between the business decision and the code that carries it

I work between the business decision and the system that has to carry it. That means I am in the room when an organisation decides what technology should do next. I am still around when the code that does it is being written.

I write software for organisations where the work is real and the margin for error is small. Payroll for volunteer teachers. The savings ledger of a chama. Billing data for a water company.

I have worked in agriculture, finance, logistics, utilities and public service for over a decade. Most of that work sits between the engineering and the business decision, which is where the interesting problems are and, honestly, where most projects go wrong. A strategy nobody can implement is just a recommendation. Implementation with no strategy behind it is expensive movement.

I founded Podii in 2018 and run it as chief executive. We build web, mobile and cloud systems for clients here in Africa and further afield. Running it has meant handling the architecture, the hiring, the client conversations and the budgets, sometimes in the same week. The lesson I did not expect is how little the individual engineer matters next to whether the team has a clear brief and the authority to act on it.

I have contracted with teams at Adobe, Fly.io, Frame.io and Pulpo on warehouse management, financial technology, document processing and collaboration platforms. The technical work is mostly distributed systems and high-concurrency applications.

I have hired and mentored more than 30 engineers, mostly through pair programming. What I have settled on is simple enough to say out loud. Tell people why the work matters, then leave them to decide how to do it. Be clear about what you expect back. A team that gets that needs very little managing.

After more than a decade of building and leading technology teams, I am doing an Executive MBA at Strathmore Business School. It is not where the strategy work started. It is there to sharpen the business language around work I have been doing for years.

Outside client work I put time into the engineering community here at home. I co-founded Elixir Kenya and ElixirConf Africa. I also spent four years as an undergraduate teaching assistant at JKUAT, walking with students who were moving into software development.

The work I care most about is in essential services. In agriculture that has meant platforms that get information to the farmer and make the operations side legible. That work is where I learned that the constraint is almost never the technology. It is whether the people using it can fit it into how they already work.

The test of a system is not whether it works on the day you hand it over. It is whether the team can change it a year later without calling you.

Principles

• Name the decision before writing the code. Most failed projects were badly framed, not badly built.
• Build systems that scale, not solutions that need somebody pushing them along every day.
• Grow people alongside products. The team outlives the project.
• Design for the conditions people actually work under, not the ones written in the brief.
• Measure the outcome, not the number of features shipped.
• Give engineers ownership, then give them the authority that has to come with it.

What I work on

Education

• Executive Master of Business Administration Strathmore Business School · 2026 – 2028 (in progress)
• BSc Electronic and Computer Engineering Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology · 2007 – 2012
• BSc Electrical and Electronic Engineering Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology · 2007 – 2012