Eche Ndeokwelu — Technical Product Manager

01 — About

Raised on business.
Built on code.

Most PMs come from either business or code. I grew up inside both — and that's shaped everything about how I build.

I watched my parents build their businesses from scratch. From a young age, I had a front-row seat to the real pains and joys of running an SME — the cashflow anxiety, the scrappy problem-solving, the pride of making something work against the odds. That experience planted something in me: a deep instinct for what users actually need, and a genuine respect for what it costs to build something that lasts.

Then I went and learned to code. Not because I had to — because I wanted to understand how things were made. That technical grounding is what lets me sit in a room with engineers and speak their language, challenge assumptions, and know when a constraint is real versus when it's just the path of least resistance.

The combination — business intuition earned at home, technical fluency earned by doing — is what makes me effective as a PM. I care about users because I grew up watching real people struggle with products that didn't understand them. I care about systems because I've built them. And I think of my job as the bridge between those two worlds: making sure technical delivery actually maps to human outcomes.

My fascination with money runs through all of it. I once wanted to be a banker. Instead I built payment gateways in Abuja, Stripe integrations in Dover, GoCardless pipelines for enterprise CRMs. The thread connecting everything: a genuine obsession with how financial systems work, and how to make them work better for the people who depend on them.

Outside of work, you'll find me at the gym or deep in conversation with friends. Family is everything to me — and that people-first instinct, the one my parents modelled, shapes how I show up at work every single day.

Payments & FinTech SME & business intuition Zero-to-one builder Regulated industries People-first leader Engineer whisperer CS First-Class Honours

02 — Philosophy

How I think.
How I work.

01

Think like an engineer. Lead like a human.

Some people call me the "engineer whisperer." I don't take that lightly. Having built from the ground up — writing code before I managed roadmaps — means I speak the language. But I also know that leadership isn't one-size-fits-all. How I get buy-in from a senior engineer resistant to AI adoption looks nothing like how I work with a junior dev finding their feet. I read people, adapt, and meet them where they are.

02

Metrics are a compass, not a destination.

I monitor dashboards and flag when things go wrong — that's table stakes. What matters more is knowing what the numbers are actually telling you, and having the strategic clarity to act on it. Data informs my decisions; it doesn't make them for me. The best product calls I've made came from combining what the data showed with what conversations in the room revealed.

03

Complexity is a design problem.

Regulated industries, legacy infrastructure, competing stakeholders — these aren't obstacles to good product work. They're the actual problem to solve. I'm drawn to zero-to-one challenges and scaling moments precisely because they require you to hold technical constraints and business outcomes in both hands at once. That tension is where I do my best thinking.

04

The best room is one where everyone speaks.

Collaboration, to me, isn't about consensus — it's about inclusion. I create the conditions where engineers push back, designers challenge assumptions, and business stakeholders stay genuinely involved. The product is always better for it. Family comes first in my personal life; that same care for people naturally shapes how I show up at work.

03 — Experience

Where I've built.

Jun 2023 — Present

Port of Dover

Dover, UK

Current

Technical Product Manager

Leading digital product across one of the UK's busiest ports — responsible for systems processing £100M+ in annual transaction value across 1M+ users per year. My remit spans payments infrastructure, ERP modernisation, and AI-driven operational tooling.

Payments Infrastructure: Led end-to-end Stripe integration across consumer-facing services — designed payment flows, dispute workflows, and chargeback processes integrated with Oracle Fusion for automated financial reconciliation.
Marina Payment Portal: Built a bespoke portal integrated with the marina management system, refining error handling and payment flows. Now processes £2M+ annually with improved authorisation success rates.
ERP Migration: Directed the transition from IFS to Oracle Fusion — managing API interoperability, data parity validation, and payment pipeline continuity across high-consequence migration windows.
Azure Data Lake: Led migration of operational data infrastructure, cutting reporting latency and improving real-time analytics access — achieving a 28% reduction in operational overhead.
AI Innovation: Built an internal LLM-powered knowledge platform and predictive reporting tools to reduce operational latency and improve decision-making across port operations.
Cashless Transition: Designed simplified digital payment flows during the port's shift to a fully cashless environment — improving checkout completion and reducing manual handling at scale.

Stripe Oracle Fusion Azure Data Lake ERP Migration LLM / Applied AI PCI-DSS Financial Reconciliation

Apr 2021 — May 2023

Senior Internet

UK

Technical Product Manager

Responsible for core SaaS products serving membership organisations and professional bodies across the UK. This role was my formal introduction to UK payment infrastructure — where I learned how enterprise billing, compliance, and developer experience intersect.

MemberBase CRM Launch: Led the end-to-end development and launch of MemberBase CRM — my first time owning a product from discovery through delivery. Integrated GoCardless Direct Debit for automated recurring billing across the enterprise client base.
Payment Gateway Integration: Oversaw integration with external payment gateways and PSPs — building on my earlier experience with QuidPay and applying it in a regulated UK context for the first time.
Developer Experience: Directed the API roadmap and environment management strategy to enable scalable B2B partner integrations across River CPD and River CMS.
Support Ticket Reduction: Prioritised backlog based on user analytics — driving a 70% reduction in support tickets through iterative UX improvements and systematic technical debt paydown.

GoCardless API Roadmap SaaS CRM Direct Debit B2B Integrations

2018 — 2021

Quidizy

Nigeria

IT Project Manager

Where my payments story began. At Quidizy I built QuidPay — a full payment gateway — from scratch. This was the foundation: API integrations, financial workflows, GTM execution, and the first time I truly understood how digital money moves.

QuidPay (Payment Gateway): Led the development of Quidizy's flagship payment product — managing API integrations, transaction flows, and cross-functional delivery across engineering, design, and QA teams.
Pecuniary Financials: Built an SME-focused inventory and sales management platform to complement the payments ecosystem.
Lumia GTM: Partnered on go-to-market execution for Lumia.ng, contributing to ₦200M+ in revenue within 12 months of launch.

Payment Gateway Zero-to-One API Integrations GTM Strategy FinTech

2018 — 2020

Creditville Nigeria

Nigeria

IT Business Support

Managed the technical backend of the C-Money financial platform, maintaining API-based data integrity across high-volume transaction processing.

Financial Platform API Integrity High-Volume Transactions

04 — Selected Work

Problems I've solved.

Case Study 01 · Port of Dover · 2023–Present

Taking a Major UK Port Cashless — at £100M Scale

£100M+

Annual transaction value

1M+

Annual users

£2M+

Marina portal volume

28%

Operational overhead reduction

01 — The Situation

When I joined Port of Dover, payments were fragmented. The port was processing over a million users a year across multiple consumer-facing services — but the underlying infrastructure was manual-heavy, reconciliation was a time-consuming finance burden, and there was no unified view of transaction data. The business had also made the strategic decision to go fully cashless, which meant every existing payment touchpoint needed to be redesigned from the ground up.

The stakes were high. Dover is one of the UK's busiest ports. Downtime or payment failures don't just create bad user experiences — they create operational crises. There was no room for a big-bang migration that could go wrong in production.

02 — The Options & Decision

The core question wasn't just which payment provider to use — it was how to build an infrastructure that could serve multiple services, integrate cleanly with our ERP (Oracle Fusion), support dispute and chargeback workflows, and scale without creating a new maintenance burden.

Stripe emerged as the clear choice for several reasons: its API-first design made integration straightforward across different service contexts, its webhook architecture allowed us to build reliable event-driven pipelines into Oracle Fusion, and its developer documentation reduced engineering risk significantly. Crucially, Stripe's built-in dispute management tooling meant we could define clear operational workflows for chargebacks without building custom tooling from scratch.

The decision wasn't without internal debate. There were stakeholders who favoured incumbent providers already used elsewhere in the organisation. My approach was to map the total cost of integration — not just licensing, but engineering hours, ongoing maintenance, and reconciliation overhead — and present that analysis clearly. The data made the case.

03 — The Hardest Part

The marina payment portal was the most technically complex piece. The marina management system had its own data model, its own transaction logic, and a very specific set of operational requirements around how payments needed to map to bookings and credit notes. Getting the payment flows and error-handling right — so that a failed authorisation didn't leave a booking in an ambiguous state — required close, iterative work with the engineering team and constant validation with the finance team who owned the downstream reconciliation process.

Politically, the hardest challenge was the cashless transition itself. Shifting a port environment where staff had operated with cash for years required more than a technical rollout — it required change management. I designed the new payment flows to be as operationally simple as possible, reducing the number of steps in every checkout journey, and worked closely with frontline teams to understand where friction points would emerge before they did.

04 — What I'd Do Differently

I would have invested in observability earlier. We built strong payment pipelines, but our real-time monitoring of transaction health — failure rates, authorisation patterns, webhook latency — came later than I'd have liked. In a high-volume environment, having that visibility from day one would have allowed us to catch edge cases faster and respond to issues before they surfaced as user complaints.

The learning I carry from this project: in regulated, operationally critical environments, the technical integration is often the easier half of the problem. The harder half is designing the operational workflows, the stakeholder communications, and the change management plan with the same rigour you apply to the architecture. I underestimated how much of my time and energy that second half would require — and I won't make that mistake again.

Case Study 02 · Port of Dover

IFS → Oracle Fusion: A High-Stakes ERP Migration

ERP migrations are notoriously risky — data parity failures, broken integrations, and financial reporting gaps can cascade quickly. I managed the end-to-end transition: API interoperability, validation during migration windows, and Stripe-to-Oracle payment pipelines that kept finance operations intact throughout.

Result 28% reduction in operational overhead. Real-time financial analytics across finance and ops teams.

Case Study 03 · Senior Internet

MemberBase CRM: My First End-to-End Product Launch

MemberBase was personal. It was the first time I owned a product from zero — discovery, delivery, and everything in between. Integrating GoCardless for recurring billing introduced me to UK payment infrastructure in full. The 70% support ticket reduction wasn't just a metric — it was proof the product genuinely worked for users.

Result 70% drop in support tickets. Fully automated billing. A product I'm proud of.

Case Study 04 · Quidizy

Building QuidPay: Where My Payments Story Began

Before Stripe, before GoCardless, before UK finance — there was QuidPay. Building a payment gateway from scratch in Abuja taught me everything I still use today: how money moves through APIs, how to harden transaction flows, and how to ship fast without shipping broken. Lumia's ₦200M+ revenue in 12 months validated the product.

Result ₦200M+ revenue within 12 months of launch. Foundation of everything that followed.

05 — Skills & Tools

The full toolkit.

Payments & FinTech

Stripe
GoCardless
Payment Gateway Architecture
PCI-DSS / GDPR
Financial Reconciliation

System & Architecture

API Lifecycle Management
ERP Integration (Oracle Fusion)
Azure Data Lake
Cloud-Native Infrastructure
Applied AI / LLM Tooling

Product & Strategy

Roadmap Definition
Backlog Prioritisation
GTM Strategy
Agile / Scrum
Stakeholder Management

Tools & Data

Jira / Azure DevOps
Figma / Miro
SQL / Python
Mixpanel / Amplitude
Claude / Cursor (AI-Enhanced)

Education & Certifications

🎓

BSc. Computer Science

Benson Idahosa University

First Class Honours

🎓

MSc. International Human Resource Management

Glasgow School of Business & Society

📜

Professional Certifications

Payment Product Management · AI Product Management · Technical PM · Scrum Master

"

Eche consistently demonstrated strong analytical, marketing and strategic thinking skills that were critical to the success of our product development efforts. She was always on top of industry trends and had a keen eye for identifying opportunities to improve our product. Eche was also a great team player and always willing to go above and beyond to support her colleagues. She was a great listener and always took the time to understand her colleagues' perspectives and needs. Eche's dedication, skills, and strong work ethic make her an ideal candidate for any product role. I highly recommend her without reservation.

Sarah Shaibu

Global Product & Growth Designer · Founder, Dezigntherapy™

Managed Eche directly at Senior Internet

View on LinkedIn

06 — Contact

Let's build
something great.

I'm open to senior Technical PM roles — particularly in payments, financial platforms, or API-driven products in regulated industries. Based in London, open to hybrid or remote.

If you're working on something at the intersection of money and technology, I'd love to hear about it.