About
Willard
Product designer and builder. Designing things that work, and work beautifully.
In Brief
I'm a product designer and builder, currently independent. I've spent the last several years helping early-stage companies figure out what to build, and making sure it works beautifully once they do.
My background spans healthcare, fintech, marketplaces, and consumer apps, mostly in African markets. I'm particularly interested in products where global design patterns break down and you have to go back to first principles.
I care about the whole product: the strategy, the system, the interaction, and the craft. Not because I can't focus, but because none of them work without the others.
Career
Mar 2026 – Present
Triply
Senior Product Designer
Leading product design across B2B and B2C products. Refreshing the design system, embedding AI into the workflow, and setting new team standards.
Jan 2025 – Present
SilkTech Limited
Product Designer (Part-Time)
Designing solutions for clients across industries. Working closely with engineers to ensure smooth handoff and high-quality end products.
Mar 2023 – Feb 2026
Goodspeed Studio
Product Designer → Freelancer
First designer at the agency. Led all client design work, managed freelance designers, and owned the full process from discovery to delivery.
Jan 2021 – Mar 2023
Savannah Informatics
Product Designer
First designer at the company. Designed a mobile app that scaled to 100k+ users and grew the design team to three people.
Jul 2018 – Jan 2021
Savannah Informatics
Software Engineer
Part of the founding engineering team. Built the company's first mobile app in Flutter, the foundation for the transition into product design.
Focus
Product Design
End-to-end product work, from discovery through delivery. Interaction design, visual systems, and the craft in between.
Design Strategy
Helping teams understand what to build before they build it. Roadmap framing, opportunity mapping, and product positioning.
Systems Thinking
Design systems, component libraries, and scalable patterns. Products that grow without breaking.
Business Thinking
I care about why a product exists commercially. Good design and good business are not in tension, they reinforce each other.
Building Products
Bridging design and engineering. I prototype in high fidelity, write specs that developers trust, and stay close to the build.
Tools
Currently Exploring
AI-native product patterns and how they break conventional UX assumptions
Design systems built for low-bandwidth, multilingual, and shared-device contexts
The intersection of financial literacy and product design across African markets
Get in touch
willardshikami@outlook.com