Speed is a lie: Meet John Ojetunde, the Engineer who measures speed in rework, not days

John Ojetunde, Head of Engineering for Deposit, Savings, and POS Channel at Moniepoint, has a confession. He fights his own engineers every day, not about code quality or technical architecture, but about something more fundamental. They argue about what speed actually means.

Most engineering teams measure velocity in days to deployment. Ojetunde measures it in aggregate cost, including the rework nobody wants to admit happens. His philosophy, speed and quality are not enemies; they answer to mastery, sounds like motivational poster wisdom until you see the math.

Imagine two engineers given the same feature to build. Mr A finishes in three days and ships it. Quality assurance tests it for two more days, finding bugs that require back-and-forth fixes. Another two days. They deploy to production. It breaks. Mr A spends three more days fixing it. Total time: eight days.

Mr B takes five days to build the same feature. Seems slower, right? But QA tests it in one day. They deploy the next day. The feature is stable. No rework needed. Total time, seven days. Mr B was faster, but nobody measured it that way because everyone stopped counting after the first deployment.

John Ojetunde, Head of Engineering for Deposit, Savings, and POS Channel at Moniepoint

The problem is people don’t aggregate the time it takes to rework some things, Ojetunde explains. They don’t factor that into the total cost. So they look at this guy who did it in three days and think he’s faster. But when you actually look at the aggregate time, you see that speed and quality really do answer to mastery.

This isn’t theoretical philosophy for Ojetunde. At Moniepoint, where his team manages infrastructure processing millions of POS transactions daily, every optimisation matters at scale. He gives an example.

Someone completes a transaction on a Moniepoint POS terminal in one minute. You optimise it to 50 seconds. That 10-second difference seems small until you multiply it across millions of transactions. Then you realise you can push for five seconds, then one second.

But you can only achieve that kind of continuous improvement when your foundation is solid enough that you’re not constantly firefighting production issues.

The philosophy comes from hard experience.

Years ago, Ojetunde worked on a deployment at Zenith Bank that reshaped his perspective on engineering. There was no internet access due to security constraints. The team had to migrate data for thousands of merchants with dirty, real-world data that broke every assumption in their design. Ojetunde practically lived at the bank for a week while stakeholders stood behind him waiting for fixes.

“What broke during that week was the illusion that you can design solutions in ideal conditions. Real live data is going to stress test your application,” he says.

Users may not use it in the way you intended. What was rebuilt was a level of ownership where he could no longer hide behind anyone else. The stakeholders didn’t care about his role or his excuses. They cared whether customers were happy.

That customer focus became non-negotiable at Moniepoint.

“Customer empathy is really important to us,” Ojetunde says.

It doesn’t really matter what gymnastics you can do. Are the customers happy? That’s the question everybody wants to answer. The kind of engineers Moniepoint hires are people who own products, not code.

“Which means if your product manager comes to you with a solution, you can push back and say this is not going to be the best way to solve the customer problem. You can only do that if you actually understand the customer problem.”

How John Ojetunde builds for Nigeria from the UK

Ojetunde holds UK Global Talent status but leads engineering for infrastructure serving Nigerian markets. The contradiction is less stark than it appears.

“You can be in Nigeria and still not understand the problem of Nigerians,” he points out. There’s an illusion of understanding. You become so familiar with problems that they become normal. You stop seeing opportunities.

John Ojetunde

“What living abroad helps us do is see what is achievable and where we can take Nigeria when it comes to technology,” he explains. “That’s why Moniepoint shoots for high-speed platforms where transfers are instant, and money always drops. Exposure to developed country infrastructure shows what’s possible. But staying connected to Nigerian reality requires deliberate effort.

“There is virtually no quarter that I’m not in Nigeria,” Ojetunde says.

His team makes regular trips for customer research, travelling to Enugu, Lagos, and other cities, because you can be in Lagos but not know the plight of people in Enugu. Moniepoint has business relationship managers close to merchants, providing constant feedback on what works and what doesn’t. The company has visibility on where every terminal is deployed, allowing them test solutions in the exact conditions customers face.

That attention to local context matters. In the UK, businesses don’t worry about data consumption on POS terminals because bandwidth is cheap and often unlimited.

In Nigeria, data costs are a real constraint. So Moniepoint optimises for someone in a village with poor internet connectivity. They send engineers to those exact locations to test whether terminals load properly under real conditions.

“You’re optimising for somebody who is in one area that does not have internet,” Ojetunde explains. “When you want to test it, you get somebody to go to that same area because you really want to experience what the customer experiences.”

“Technology is a global language,” he notes, “but the problems are local.” The underlying value is customer empathy. It doesn’t really matter where you are. If you have customer empathy, you have it.

Why John is fighting AI scepticism by training Junior Engineers

John Ojetunde runs DreamDev, Moniepoint’s programme for training junior engineers, at a time when many companies are questioning whether they need junior developers at all. AI can generate code at scale now. Why invest in training people from scratch?

His answer is pragmatic.

There are short-term goals and long-term goals, he says. Who are the people who will be the next senior developers? If there are no pipelines for people to grow into, eventually you will not have senior developers again because nobody was invested in. You have to be conscious to make sure you are grooming people who can be the future.

The gap he keeps seeing is that many self-described senior developers don’t have solid fundamentals.

They picked up skills on the fly, building websites and apps without understanding what happens behind the scenes. When production breaks under pressure, they can’t solve it because they never really understood the foundation.

“Experience is the best teacher,” Ojetunde acknowledges, “but it’s too expensive. You can pay with customer downtime, or you can pay with losing money. Can you learn the same lesson without experiencing it? By standing on the shoulders of somebody who experienced it while they guide you? Yes.”

DreamDev goes back to basics with a custom syllabus focused on fundamentals and practical systems. The goal is not to train Flutter engineers or React engineers. The goal is to train software engineers, people who solve problems with software regardless of the specific tool.

John Ojetunde

Moniepoint distinguishes between a Flutter engineer, someone who only works in that framework, and a mobile engineer, someone who can work in Flutter, native, or whatever the problem requires.

One graduate from the first DreamDev cohort got a full-time role immediately, not even an internship, because he was that good. That’s the point.

Ojetunde is passionate about mentorship because impact scales through people.

It’s nice for you to do some things, he says, but it’s nicer if your reach is going to be bigger because you have more people doing the same thing.

At Moniepoint, what keeps Ojetunde up at night is both people and systems. “People, because the quality of people you have determines the quality of output you get. They make judgment calls that they can only make because of their particular quality. Systems, because in a fast-paced market like Nigeria, you always want to be ahead of the curve. And you can only be ahead if you keep reworking and rewiring your thinking.”

The bigger the scale, the more those little gains matter. The better the people, the more sustainable the growth becomes.

Speed and quality are not enemies, John Ojetunde insists. But you can only achieve both when you understand that what looks slow today might be the only thing fast enough to last.

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