The Player

Name: Udo Odibo
Role: Product Designer
The Path: 2023–2024: Product Designer at AIENAI, United Kingdom
2024: Design Consultant at Public Digital
2025: Product Designer at Valour, United States
2025–Present: Founder & Design Lead at Kova
The Play: “My openness to learning things outside of my comfort zone has led me here, and I highly recommend it.”

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For Africans looking to work with companies outside their countries, it is not always a straightforward path. Especially when your career is young. However, it is absolutely possible to build a career that crosses borders without moving first.

Udo Odibo has done it, and here are the plays he ran.

Play 1: Start with the ABCs

On the Field: It might seem obvious, but before you start applying for international roles, you must get good at what you do first. Tools, trends and the idea of landing a big foreign opportunity can distract you before you build a strong foundation.

The Move: Learn the principles of good design like the back of your palm. Understand user research, information architecture, interaction design, visual hierarchy, accessibility, and prototyping.

More importantly, understand the thinking behind your decisions.

A good product designer should be able to explain why a particular user flow works, what problem they are solving and how they arrived at a solution, rather than simply presenting a polished interface.

The rationale is simple: the better you understand the fundamentals of your work, the easier it becomes to solve problems, explain your decisions, collaborate with developers, and adapt if tools change.

Play 2: Hire yourself before anyone does.

On the Field: One of the easiest ways to get stuck early in your career as a product designer is waiting for someone to hire you before building experience you can use in creating a portfolio. You can build experience before you ever get hired.

The Move: Mini projects are a good place to start. Give yourself a challenge to work on every week. The goal is to engage your mind, practise your craft, and build a portfolio of dummy tasks that show potential employers your capacity.

You also don’t have to build anything from scratch. Pick a product you use regularly and redesign one part of the experience. It could be the onboarding flow of a fintech app, the checkout process of a shopping platform or the KYC flow on an insurance app.

Document the problem you are solving, who the users are, the outcome of your research, the options you had, and why you chose the one you did. Show the wireframes, iterations and final designs.

That is what turns pretty screens into a product design case study.

Do this weekly for three months, and you will have yourself a portfolio and a sharper sense of what good design looks like. Also, you do not need to build a fancy website for your portfolio.

A simple presentation on Behance, Dribbble, or even Notion works, especially when you are just starting out. No hiring manager would care about how cute your portfolio looks if the quality of work in it is awful.

Play 3: Visibility is on the other side of being cringe

On the Field: When you are starting out in your career, you must prioritize visibility because it moves the needle. Visibility makes it easier for people to discover you, understand your value, and decide to hire you.

If you are worried about falling into the slippery slope of aura farming or unintentionally becoming an internet personality, there is a way around that.

The Move: Whenever you share your work, ensure it revolves around what you are learning and your thought process around problem-solving.

It could be explaining a design decision you made, sharing your thoughts about a redesign or product experience, and talking about something new you learned from user research.

If engagement is what you want, then you could share a case study from your project and ask other designers to critique your thought process.

Anything other than this is overkill because remember, the goal is to make it easy and possible for the right person to see your work.

“One random Saturday, someone I coached reached out to me to ask if I was available to work on a digital platform being developed for Edo State. We got on a call on Sunday to align, and by Tuesday, I was on a flight to Edo. Every aspect of that experience changed my perspective on what is possible.”

Play 4: The relationships you built yesterday come in handy today

On the Field: Referrals are the easiest way to find remote job opportunities, and they typically come from the relationships cultivated long before you need a job: former schoolmates, other designers, product managers, developers, mentors, mentees, friends, or even mutuals on social media.

Good designers rarely work alone. There is constant collaboration with people within the realm such as developers, product managers, UX researchers, marketers, and other designers.

The Move: One opportunity can birth another. Someone you worked with on a project might recommend you to someone else who needs your skills on their team. So while you strive to do good work, nurture your relationships too.

Stay in touch with people. Send that ‘happy birthday’ text. Volunteer when you can, don’t hoard knowledge, join design communities, participate in meaningful conversations, and don’t hesitate to reach out to fellow designers to commend their work or ask questions.

There is no telling what rooms your name might get mentioned in.

Play 5: Take the stepping-stone role

On the Field: Every person whose career you admire had a stepping-stone job that got their foot in the door. Factors you cannot control, such as timing, hiring decisions, budget, competition, and visibility, determine if and when you get an international job.

The Move: Don’t turn down the stepping-stone role. It’s alright if you work for a local company, or take on small projects as a freelancer. Your first opportunity to work with engineers and a product manager on a real payment product might just be at a local startup.

The small opportunities are great because they allow you to sharpen your skills, meet people, and do work that you can share.

Don’t take them for granted.

Timeout

The Myth: Exposure is all you need when you are just starting out.
Udo’s Truth: Ask for financial compensation but don't be greedy.

Play 6: Your work ethic must be A1

On the Field: Getting the international job is one thing. Keeping it is another. When you work with an international team, you must understand that your colleagues operate in a completely different time zone, with different expectations around communication and professionalism.

An example is punctuality. If a meeting is scheduled for 10 am, be there at 9:55 am.

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The Move: For teams working across countries, a delay may feel insignificant to you but it can disrupt someone else’s schedule. Being reliable is a core value for remote teams.

This applies to communication, meeting deadlines and being clear about what you need. If you are waiting on a developer, say that. If you are unsure about a requirement, ask. If you have changed course due to new information from users, share that with your team.

Always remember that your team cannot simply walk over to your desk for a quick chat. So your Figma file, documentation, messages and presentations need to be stellar.

It’s not enough to just show that you can do the work. Make it a priority to show that you are trustworthy when you join that international team.

Final Whistle: Your ambition is not out of reach

Don’t believe the tales about how nearly impossible it is to land a job as a product designer on an international team from Africa.

There will be highs and lows, but you simply have to focus on becoming good enough to do the work, building proof that you can do it, positioning yourself strategically, and building relationships that get you in the right rooms.

So start where you are and build from there. The quality of your work will take you further.

London is exciting for Africans moving to the United Kingdom. It is a global hub for technology, finance, business and culture, and there are plenty of opportunities to meet people from all over the world.

If you work remotely, freelance or own a business, you may spend more time at home than intended. That’s where co-working spaces come in.

The right workspace is somewhere comfortable and reliable to work, that allows you to explore a new part of London, meet new people and build your network.

If you are new to London, and looking for the perfect place to work, here are five workspaces worth considering:

Drop-In

The simplicity and intentionality at Drop-In is what makes it stand out.

Nearly every desk has a monitor, allowing customers to connect their devices and enjoy the comfort of working with a wider screen. They also have soundproof booths which are useful for recording voiceovers, or really confidential work calls.

With branches in Clapton, Richmond, and Wandsworth, Drop-In offers a day pass for £40 alongside three tiers of membership, starting at £180 monthly. Regardless of your membership tier, you get 20% off coffee from their in-house cafe.

And if you prefer matcha, they have it too.

Arc

If you want to work somewhere hospitable, head over to any Arc outlets in Stratford, Tottenham, Earlsfield, or Walthamstow.

Arc is divided into two halves; an area has meeting rooms suitable for small to medium sized teams, while the other area has desks with monitors to allow customers to plug in and work with larger screens.

Both halves are serene.

Built to cater to everyone who walks in through its doors, Arc offers complimentary coffee and lattes, as well as a kitchen that’s accessible to all.

So if you need to heat up your lunch, or want to make your coffee how you like it, worry not.

The day pass at Arc is priced at £30, but their day pack bundle goes for £130/5 day passes and is a crowd favorite.

There is also a special £10 day pass for full-time students, NHS staff, social workers, and other eligible persons.

Gecko Coffeehouse

From the outside looking in, Gecko Coffeehouse in Shoreditch looks like your average cafe selling yummy treats. But what most people do not know is that it has a cozy, dimly lit workspace underground.

The intimate space has tables and chairs that can sit medium-sized groups, fast wifi, charging extensions, and a free water station. If you make friends fast, it will happen here.

Gecko does not charge a fee to work in the space, however, everyone is expected to buy a meal or drink from the cafe. The good news is their menu is inexpensive, and students get a 10% discount on their order.

If you are unsure what to order while you work, you can’t go wrong with their sausage sandwich.

Enish Soho Edition

Enish is one of the most popular places to get Nigerian food in London. Now, they have put an interesting spin on their Soho outlet with a fine dining adjacent underground co-working space.

The co-working space mimics a cave, with lots of dimly lit sections that are perfect for locking in and doing deep focus work, or virtual and in-person meetings. It opens at 1:00 pm, and costs £15. The wifi is great, and the unlimited coffee is delicious.

The menu for the space is simple and inexpensive so don’t worry about splurging. So if your goal is to work, have some jollof rice with fanta, and relax, this is where you need to be.

The Counter

On the days you want to work from somewhere gorgeous in Central London but your budget is lean, go to The Counter.

Their two locations in Central London are designed with vibrant colors and art that might remind you of the early 2000s and make you a little nostalgic. In addition to the co-working tables, chairs, and call booths, they have comfortable high desks too.

The Counter is particularly great because access to the space costs £15, and the cost of any snack or drink bought from their cafe is deducted from the £15!

It’s Time to Leave Your House

The focal advantage of working remotely is that you are not bound to the same desk every day. When you are new to a city as big as London, that flexibility is useful.

Changing your workspace from time to time gives you a break from your routine, puts you in new neighborhoods, and allows you to meet people you typically would not encounter.

As an African building a career in the UK, that is valuable because building a life is just as important.

So decide on a part of London to explore, choose a workspace and see where the day brings. You might have a productive work day, discover something new and enjoyable, and make a new friend while at it.

If you know a great workspace in London that did not make our list, share your recommendation and tell us why you like it in the comments.

In an era of unprecedented global connectivity, migration stands as a defining characteristic of our times. People from diverse corners of the world embark on new journeys, seeking enhanced opportunities and novel experiences in foreign lands. This decision to migrate often stems from a multitude of factors: economic prospects, safety assurances, educational pursuits, and more. Amid the excitement of forging a new path, immigrants frequently encounter challenges that can mar the transition process.

Imagine moving to a new country with every intention of getting straight to work, and finding that you cannot rent a flat, open an account, or put anything on a card. You held down work. Put money aside. Paid rent for years, settled bills the week they came, borrowed and paid it back on time, every time. Then you moved, and none of it counts. These are the hidden problems immigrants deal with every day. Financial stability in an unfamiliar country is not a convenience. It is the difference between arriving and settling.

The card applications come back declined, and nobody can tell you why, because there is no why. There is just a blank space where your record should be. The issuer is not looking at a bad customer. It is looking at nothing, and it declines. This oversight not only impedes personal advancement but also deprives economies of the opportunity to harness the diverse talents and aspirations of these new entrants. The time has come to reshape this narrative.

At Maxim, we are rethinking the immigrant experience. Maxim gives you a credit card, built for people who have a history and no way to show it, because they built it somewhere else. So we go and find it. We look at where you are now and where you have come from, and we build a financial identity out of both, rather than asking you for a local credit score you have not had the time to earn. Everyone, regardless of background or origin, should be able to access financial services on the strength of what they have actually done.

This is not merely about facilitating transactions. It is about insisting that ten years of paying on time does not stop being true because you got on a plane. You did not arrive with nothing. That blank space is the problem, not you.

You have proved yourself enough already. From here, you are just building. Your history is yours. It should not have to be explained, apologised for, or started over.

Try Maxim here.

You can do everything right and still be unreadable to the system that decides whether you get a credit card.

That is not a failure of character or effort. It is a failure of information. Credit decisions are made on a narrow set of records, and when those records are thin, absent, or held somewhere the decision cannot reach, the answer comes back no. Not because anything troubling turned up, but because nothing turned up at all.

Here is what actually goes wrong.

The data exists, but it is locked away

Credit information sits in systems that are expensive to reach and difficult to join up. Getting to it requires membership, integration and cost that most businesses will not take on for a small group of applicants. So the information that would settle the question stays where it is, and the decision gets made without it. The record is not missing. Nobody has gone to get it.

A score removes the story that produced it

A credit score compresses years of behaviour into a number, and in the compression the reasons disappear. A gap in the record could be redundancy, a move, a year abroad, or a deliberate choice not to borrow. The score does not say which. Even the underlying data, when it is available, rarely explains itself well enough for anyone to reconstruct what happened. What gets read is the number. What matters is the life behind it.

A report describes a moment that has already passed

Credit reports are snapshots. They lag behind the person they describe, and whole categories of financial behaviour never reach them at all. Someone whose position improved six months ago can still be assessed on who they were before that, and someone paying rent reliably every month may find that none of it registers anywhere that counts.

Some lives leave no trail at all

In economies that run largely on cash, people build real financial lives that generate almost no reportable history. Income earned, obligations met, businesses run, and none of it recorded in a form any assessment can use. The absence of a file is treated as a signal about the person. It is not. It is a signal about what the system happened to record.

What a fuller picture changes

Every one of those problems is the same problem. The decision is being made on less information than exists.

A thin file is an absence of evidence, not evidence of risk. When more of the picture is available, and when the context behind it can actually be read, the answer changes. Not because anyone’s standards dropped, but because the uncertainty did.

At Maxim, that is the work. We look at where you are now and where you have come from, and we build a financial identity out of both, rather than asking you for a local credit score you have not had the time to earn. Where the picture is still thin, we open a route to fill it in rather than a reason to turn you away.

You did not arrive with nothing. The blank space is the problem, not you.

The Maxim credit card is the next step in that work.

In today’s interconnected global economy, access to credit is not just a financial service but a gateway to opportunity. For millions of people and businesses worldwide, that access remains out of reach. The barriers are familiar: thin or non-existent credit histories, records that sit in one country while the decision is made in another, and no straightforward way to have creditworthiness assessed and recognised.

At the heart of addressing these challenges lies the concept of credit infrastructure, a comprehensive framework comprising credit bureaus, scoring models, and data-sharing mechanisms. In this blog post, we explore the critical role of credit infrastructure in promoting financial inclusion and driving economic development.

Understanding Credit Infrastructure

Credit infrastructure encompasses a network of institutions, technologies, and regulations designed to assess creditworthiness and facilitate lending decisions. At its core are credit bureaus, which collect and aggregate data on individuals’ and businesses’ credit behaviour, enabling providers to evaluate risk. Complementing these bureaus are scoring models that analyse this data to generate credit scores, providing insights into repayment capability. Alongside them sit data-sharing mechanisms, often called reporting systems, which allow information to be exchanged among stakeholders and bring transparency and efficiency to credit markets.

Enabling Financial Inclusion

A key objective of credit infrastructure is to expand access to credit for people the traditional system was never built to assess, including those with limited credit histories or living far from where decisions get made. Inclusive credit infrastructure leverages alternative data sources, such as utility payments and mobile phone usage, to assess creditworthiness beyond traditional metrics. By adopting innovative approaches to risk assessment, providers can extend credit to people who were previously excluded, so that ambition is not held back by the absence of a file.

As we reflect on the role of credit infrastructure in fostering financial inclusion, it becomes evident that its impact extends far beyond individual transactions or institutions. A well-functioning credit infrastructure is a catalyst for economic growth, social mobility, and poverty reduction, laying the foundation for sustainable development.

At Maxim, we are committed to advancing this mission by leveraging technology and partnerships to enhance credit access for people the current system has never bothered to look at properly. A thin credit file is not the same as bad credit. It is an absence of evidence, not evidence of risk, and we are building for the people that distinction has always failed. The Maxim credit card is the next step in that work.

Credit that recognises you, wherever you are.