Africa's hospitality and travel industry has long run on disconnected systems, manual processes and fragmented tools, making it difficult for hotels, travel agencies and tourism businesses to operate at scale. Gopaddi Technologies is building an operating system to change that, and Motunrayo “Mo” Olaleye is one of the people making it work.

Olaleye is a Product and Operations professional with seven years of experience spanning venture capital and fintech. At Gopaddi Technologies, she leads product vision, strategy and growth across her product verticals, while also running Platform Operations, where she is responsible for platform stability and delivering an outstanding customer experience. That combination puts both how the product is built and how it works for customers within her remit — a practical fit for a company focused on connecting fragmented parts of the travel industry.

Her path to the travel-tech company ran through finance. Before Gopaddi, she worked as a Product and Operations Manager at Funema, a venture-building firm, where she built systems and operational structures while driving the digitisation of existing frameworks. She also served as a Product Manager at Dukka and Hadi Finance, leading development of fintech products that served thousands of users across Africa.

Outside her day job, Olaleye has built communities and initiatives around technology, finance and talent. She led YellowHub, a personal finance brand that helped more than 400 young professionals build better financial habits, and co-founded a tech talent initiative that supported early-stage Product Managers. She mentors across tech programmes and speaks at industry events, and is particularly drawn to the 0-to-1 journey — the work of turning a raw idea into something real, structured and scalable.

In a TechNext24 “Women in Tech” interview, she offered a look at the routines and tools behind her work.

A structured start to the day

“I usually start my mornings with devotion, then I plan out my day or adjust previously set plans around work and other things I need to get done,” she said.

Her workspace is deliberately simple: two laptops — a MacBook and a Windows machine — plus her phone. When working remotely, she keeps one laptop open for work while the other plays a video or, more often, jazz music in the background.

“For some weird reason, I like having something playing while I work,” she said, “except when I'm doing deep-thinking work and need complete silence.” For quick notes she still reaches for a notepad. “It's still one of those simple things I find really useful.”

Todoist as an 'external brain'

Olaleye's toolkit is extensive, but Todoist sits at the centre of it. “I'm very much a systems person, so I use it to plan both my work and personal life,” she said.

For work, she relies on Microsoft Teams for communication and team collaboration, Microsoft 365 for day-to-day productivity, and Figma to collaborate with designers and work through product ideas. AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have also become a regular part of her workflow, especially for research, brainstorming, structuring ideas and getting through more repetitive work.

Her most-used apps, she said, are WhatsApp and Todoist. WhatsApp keeps her connected with her people; Todoist functions as her memory. “Todoist, on the other hand, is basically my external brain,” she said. “I tend to remember things or random tasks at the most unexpected times, so I quickly drop them into Todoist before I forget.” If a task is not on her Todoist, she added, “there's a good chance I'll forget it.”

Breaks, podcasts and thinking out loud

Between work sessions, Olaleye steps away entirely — sometimes for a nap, other times for YouTube videos or podcasts ranging from Lenny's Podcast to the Afropolitan Podcast, or random content around tech, product and entrepreneurship. She also leans on her network, talking through problems with “really smart tech people” among her friends when she needs a fresh perspective or some inspiration.

An EHR system for Nigeria's fragmented patient data

Asked what she would build outside her current role, Olaleye pointed to healthcare. Nigeria's healthcare system still suffers heavy fragmentation, particularly around patient data: when someone moves from one hospital to another, their medical history does not always move with them in a way that is seamless and accessible to the next provider.

“I've experienced this personally, both with myself and with a loved one,” she said, describing how frustrating it can be to repeat medical histories or piece information together all over again. While Nigeria has a number of EMR systems, she argued the country needs to move closer to true EHR interoperability, where those systems can actually communicate with each other.

A personal finance operating system

With unlimited time and money, the self-described finance enthusiast would build a configurable Personal Finance Operating System — a single view of a person's finances covering subscriptions, investments, insurance, short-term savings, expenses and everything in between.

She already runs a manual system to track those categories for herself and would like to see it become a proper digital platform. Existing apps solve parts of the problem individually, she noted, but she sees an opportunity to bring everything together into one operating system that people can configure around their own financial lives.

Inspiration and advice

Olaleye does not name a single woman in tech as her greatest inspiration. Instead, she draws motivation from Black women founders and product professionals who have disrupted their industries and are making a real impact in tech, citing Odunayo Eweniyi, Oluwatobi Otokiti, Confidence Staveley, Ada Nduka Oyom, Yanmo Omoregbe, Peace Itimi and Adora Nwodo, among many others.

“I find it inspiring to see women building, leading, and creating their own paths in an industry that is constantly evolving,” she said.

Her guiding principle is simple: “Clarity comes with movement.” It is okay not to have everything figured out from the start, she said — sometimes clarity only arrives by taking the next step, learning from it and continuing to make intentional progress.

“We're all figuring things out as we go,” she added. “You just need to keep moving, learning, and adjusting along the way.”

If she could sit down with one person, it would be Damilola Olokesusi of Shuttlers. Olaleye said she would love to learn more about Olokesusi's journey, how she built Shuttlers and the experiences that shaped her along the way.