Mottars

The problem

Buying a used car in Nigeria means running three separate hunts at once: the car, the parts it will need, and someone trustworthy to fit them. Each one happens in a different place — dealer lots, WhatsApp groups, a mechanic someone vouched for — and none of them carry any verification you can check. Mottars puts the three in one product and makes the verification the thing you are actually buying.

What I did

• Owned the product direction: what shipped next, what got upgraded, and what was deliberately left out. Held the backlog and used it to keep scope creep off a roadmap that four different user types were all pulling at.
• Specified the four-sided model — buyers, dealers, parts sellers and auto repairers — so each side has its own reason to show up rather than one audience carrying the marketplace.
• Defined the trust layer that the proposition rests on: dealer verification, vehicle history reports covering accidents, ownership and service records, and direct support when a deal goes sideways.
• Specified the search model across brand, region, vehicle type, price band and year, covering sixteen Nigerian cities, plus a request-a-car flow so demand with no matching listing still reaches verified dealers.
• Scoped the commercial mechanics buyers actually needed here: direct offers and negotiation, and split payment plans, because full price up front rules out most of the market.
• Hired and ran a beta tester cohort alongside QA, and combined their findings with heuristic evaluation and user research into one prioritised fix list — polish, corrections and gaps that only show up in the field.
• Reviewed and tested each release myself before sign-off, so what shipped matched what was specified.

Where it landed

Stack & tools