Lessons from building healthcare products in Nigeria - Damilola Adelekan (Lead Product Manager, Remedial Health)

Sep 24, 2025

Damilola Adelekan, Lead Product Manager at Remedial Health, shares her journey from zoology to health tech in Nigeria. She emphasizes that digitizing fragmented healthcare systems requires end-to-end thinking. Damilola discusses the importance of partnerships over building everything in-house and offers practical strategies for increasing tech adoption among low-digital-literacy users. She also highlights valuing customer feedback through diverse channels and stresses the need for pragmatism in product decision-making.

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ANECDOTE

Unconventional Path To Healthtech Product

Damilola moved from studying zoology into healthtech through volunteering and communications roles.
She landed product roles at telemedicine startups and rose to Lead Product Manager at Remedial Health within two years.

INSIGHT

Digitising One Piece Won't Fix The System

Digitising a single part of healthcare doesn't fix the broken system.
You must design for the whole 360° chain including data and policy to make real improvements.

INSIGHT

Tackle Fragmentation, Trust, And Funding Together

Nigeria's healthcare problems include fragmentation, trust gaps, and funding shortages.
Remedial Health addresses authenticity, logistics and credit to cover multiple failure points in the chain.

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In this episode of The Product Experience, hosts Lily Smith and Randy Silver speak with Damilola Adelekan, Lead Product Manager at Remedial Health, who discusses building pragmatic, people-centred solutions in Africa’s fragmented and under-resourced healthcare system.

Chapters
05:30 – Early Lessons from Volunteering and Nonprofits
07:00 – Why Digitising a Broken System Isn’t Enough
10:00 – Tackling Trust, Funding, and Fragmentation in Healthcare
12:30 – Collaborating Beyond the Organisation
14:30 – Building a Full Healthcare Supply Chain
16:00 – Pragmatism Over Perfection in Product Vision
18:00 – Cross-Team Collaboration at Scale
20:00 – Structuring Product Work Across Functions
22:00 – Communications Tips for Cross-Functional Leadership
24:00 – Increasing Tech Adoption Among Low-Digital-Literacy Users
26:00 – Customer Research in Low-Tech Contexts
28:00 – Voice of the Customer: Calls, Feedback, and Sales Teams
30:00 – What Inspires a Product Manager in Nigeria?

Featured Links: Follow Damilola on LinkedIn | Remedial Health | Inspire Africa | 'How I got my job in product' feature with Damilola at Mind The Product

Our Hosts
Lily Smith enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Chief Product Officer at BBC Maestro, and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy Silver is a Leadership & Product Coach and Consultant. He gets teams unstuck, helping you to supercharge your results. Randy's held interim CPO and Leadership roles at scale-ups and SMEs, advised start-ups, and been Head of Product at HSBC and Sainsbury’s. He participated in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Coaching the Coaches forum, and speaks frequently at conferences and events. You can join one of communities he runs for CPOs (CPO Circles), Product Managers (Product In the {A}ether) and Product Coaches. He’s the author of What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19. A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy also launched Amazon’s music stores in the US & UK.