The COO Perspective: Scaling Tech Operations in Emerging Markets

Most enterprise technology playbooks were written for markets with reliable electricity, consistent broadband, mature payment infrastructure, and deep pools of specialised talent. When I took on operational leadership at TNG, my first task was to identify which parts of those playbooks applied to our context and which needed to be thrown out entirely.

The answer, broadly, was: keep the principles, discard the assumptions.

Talent: The Real Constraint

The conventional wisdom about African tech talent is that it is scarce. This is partially true and mostly misleading. There is no shortage of intelligent, motivated people who can be excellent engineers. There is a shortage of people with ten years of production experience in specific enterprise technologies — but that is equally true of every fast-growing tech market globally.

What we did: we built internal training programs from the ground up, paired every junior hire with a senior engineer for their first six months, and invested heavily in documentation culture. Our onboarding process is now something we consider a genuine competitive advantage. Engineers who join TNG develop faster than they would at most organisations — and they stay because of it.

Procurement and Vendor Risk

When you operate in a market where a key vendor's Africa presence consists of a single sales representative based in London, your risk profile is fundamentally different from a company operating in San Francisco. A support ticket that takes two business days to resolve in the US can take two weeks when it requires escalation through a regional intermediary.

We mitigated this by building multi-vendor redundancy into every critical system and maintaining internal expertise in the tools we depend on. We do not outsource knowledge of our own infrastructure. Every engineer on our platform team can diagnose and resolve the failure modes that would require vendor support elsewhere.

Operations as a Product

The insight that most transformed how I think about my role: operations is not a support function. It is a product. The reliability of our systems, the speed of our deployments, the quality of our monitoring — these directly determine what our engineering team can build and how fast they can build it.

We invested in internal tooling earlier than most companies our size would, because the leverage of a well-built internal platform in our market context is higher than it would be where commercial alternatives work reliably out of the box.

What I Would Tell Other COOs in This Space

Do not try to replicate Silicon Valley operational models in African markets. Study them, extract the principles, and rebuild for your context. The principles — bias for automation, invest in people, measure what matters — are universal. The implementation is entirely local.

The companies that win here will be the ones that build operational excellence as an indigenous capability, not an imported one.