How we map who leads Africa's top startups

Our Market Maps show who leads engineering, product, design and growth at Africa's top startups, and who sits under them. The first one covers ten Nigerian fintechs. When people see a map, the first question is usually "where did you get this?" This piece answers that, and sets out the rules we follow about personal data.

What a talent market map is

A talent market map is a structured picture of where senior people sit in a market. Ours works in five levels. It starts with the market (Nigeria Fintech), then each company, then each function inside the company, then the leader who owns that function, and finally the critical talent under that leader.

By critical talent we mean the senior individual contributors and squad leads who drive the business: the staff engineer everyone goes to with hard problems, or the product lead who owns payments. These are the people founders most often want to hire, and they are hardest to see from outside a company.

We start with engineering, product, design and growth, because those are the functions our clients hire for most. Inside engineering we also look for DevOps, QA and security, which are easy to miss because they are often folded into other teams. Our piece on who leads engineering at Nigeria's top fintechs shows what that turns up.

Where the data comes from

Everything on a map comes from public professional information. Most of the work happens on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, where we search each company by department and seniority. We add company pages and press coverage to confirm who holds the top roles. When a source is dated, we record the year, so readers can see how fresh it is.

We do not scrape private data, buy contact lists or guess at anything we cannot see. If a person's current role is unclear, they either get marked for checking or left off.

How we build each map

We start with a spreadsheet, not software. For every person there is a row with their name, company, title and our level for them. This was a deliberate choice: a spreadsheet is fast to review, easy to correct, and makes it obvious when something is missing.

Then every row is checked by hand before it goes on the site. Automated tools are useful for finding people. They are not reliable enough to decide whether someone still works at a company or what their title really means.

For three companies we went further and charted the whole organisation, department by department. Where a reporting line is inferred from titles rather than confirmed, we mark it as likely rather than presenting it as fact.

How we level people

Titles are the hardest part. "Team Lead", "Engineering Lead" and "AVP, Engineering" can mean similar jobs at different companies, or quite different jobs at the same one. So we level people by what they own rather than by their title. A leader owns a function. Critical talent owns a significant part of the product or platform, whatever their title says.

We show team sizes as ranges rather than exact headcounts. Headcounts change every quarter, and an exact number would suggest a precision we do not have.

What we leave out

There are no email addresses, phone numbers or personal social accounts on a map. There is no salary information about any named person; pay data lives separately in Salary Data, where it is anonymous and shown as ranges. And nothing appears that is not already public.

We follow the Nigeria Data Protection Act, which governs how personal data about people in Nigeria is collected and used. A draft map stays out of search engines until every person on it has been reviewed. And anyone on a map can ask us to correct their entry or remove it, and we will do it.

What comes next

Nigeria Fintech is the first map. Other markets will follow, and we plan to publish a fuller report in the first half of 2027. If you want to know how the maps can help with a hire, or you are on one and something is out of date, get in touch.