Commerce, made available to whoever wants to sell

Kelvin Omozokpia is co-founder, CEO and CTO at Cartinary, and here those are one job. What the company sells and what it is built on are the same decision. He sets the direction, owns the architecture underneath it, and still writes the code that ships.

His engineering years went on systems where being wrong is expensive, banking and investment platforms where a rounding error becomes an incident. What that leaves is instinct rather than process: what has to be transactional, and which failure has to be impossible. He has done it for Nigerian teams and foreign ones, in Lagos, Nairobi, Hyderabad and Tel Aviv.

The MBA from Lagos Business School is what makes the CEO title real. He judges an engineering decision by what it costs and what it earns, not only by whether it is elegant, and he tests that on paying clients at Darkel Microsystems, the software firm he founded and still runs.

Osaro Ero is co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Cartinary, where he owns what the product does and how it feels to use. His remit runs the length of a merchant’s day: the storefront a customer lands on, the checkout that takes their money, the stock that has to stay honest, and the payout that ends it.

He is a designer who treats an interface as something to be measured rather than admired. Interface performance analysis, process mapping and project modelling are the working method — find where a screen loses people, document it, and report it in terms someone can act on. Design decisions follow that evidence rather than taste.

The rest is temperament. Analytical by default and organised by necessity, he holds several priorities at once without letting any of them drift, and works across engineering and operations rather than handing designs over a wall. Complex problems get taken apart, not decorated.