Dela Kumahor

I'm a Product and Service Designer with 10+ years of experience doing UX Research and Design, Communication Design and Service Design, but my main focus over the past few years has been on digital Product Design and Management. I greatly enjoy the alchemy of developing product strategy based on user insights and the process of figuring out how to make something useful and well-behaved. I’m also one of those weird people that gets a rush of out of organising, streamlining and making sense of complexity. In recent years I have been doing this and more at The Cobalt Partners — a consulting company in Accra that I co-founded — where I built the design team and worked on several cross-disciplinary (design, business analysis and software development) project teams from 2014 until late 2017. 

As an independent consultant, I was most recently designing and building capacity at a financial technology startup. In addition to helping redefine the value proposition of the company’s product more clearly through research and a Minimum Viable Product, I also trained and mentored the team to conduct interviews, synthesis and usability tests, which they are now able to do autonomously to support their own processes moving forward. I enjoy and am very comfortable defining product rationale by creating flows, wireframes, low and high fidelity screens, and interactive prototypes. 

I have been coding for the Web off and on since the year 2000, making stops (admittedly) at PHP and Flash ActionScript development along the way. While I no longer claim ‘Web Developer’ as one of my titles, I’m very confident in my abilities to build interfaces with HTML, CSS and Javascript, and my ability to adapt to new frameworks where needed. I have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science (concentration in Digital Media Design) from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master’s in Product-Service Systems Design from the Politecnico di Milano. I’m a native English speaker and an excellent written, verbal and visual communicator.