Samuel Allotey

Co-founded GatePass, a video-first event ticketing platform, and leads product design and brand direction. The platform is in active development ahead of public launch.

Co-leads a UX-centered hackathon partnered with the Ashesi Centre for Entrepreneurship. Led Hack54’s setup and growth, including partnerships and sponsorship for subsequent editions.

Appointed Country Manager for IxDF and leads Local Group growth across Ghana. Oversees chapter leadership and expands through meetups, workshops, and institutional partnerships, including the IxDF Knowledge Partnership with the Design Your Greatness Campus Tour.

Founded Verslaaf Studio, a premium design house delivering brand identity, UI/UX, and web design for clients including Google, Air Ghana, and MEST Africa.

Co-founded Ghana’s design and technology community and built initiatives including the Design Your Greatness Campus Tour and DYG Clubs across 5+ universities. Grew YouTube to 600,000+ views and launched JunkieTalks Podcast (2022–2024) as well as a 2026 student bursary in partnership with the Mensah-Bonsu Foundation.

Founded Ghana’s largest design and innovation conference, FiDCon, and leads strategy, programming, speaker curation, sponsorship, and production. Grew FiDCon from 360+ attendees in 2024 to 900+ in 2025.

Owned end-to-end product design across a suite of cross-border African securities trading platforms, partnering with 10 engineers and 2 product managers. Built a standardized design system and designed KYC onboarding that reduced registration time by 40%, while QA processes reduced post-launch errors by 60%.

Invited speaker at consecutive editions of one of Ghana’s prominent annual technology industry events in 2024 and 2025.

Built StubHub’s design system from scratch across a large ticketing marketplace. Led the migration from Sketch to Figma and supported journey-mapping workshops to embed user-centric thinking.

Drove product design for a skilled trades hiring marketplace. Improved messaging performance (136% increase in messages sent Jan–Aug 2022) and facilitated workshops to surface recruiter pain points, ranking top 3 in the product team for Q1 and Q2 2022.

Led design for the Ghana.GOV mobile application for tax payments, subsidies, and public job access. Designed myGHQR (QR-based payments) and a courier delivery app, contributing to product-market fit discovery via user research in 2021.

Served as ADPList’s founding product designer and built the MVP with co-founders. Designed key surfaces including homepage, onboarding, accounts, and calendar features that helped scale the platform from ~20,000 to 150,000+ mentees across 70 countries by 2023.

Coordinated the IWD DigiVibe CareerEssentials campaign to drive awareness and participation around digital career pathways for women across Ghana.

Invited to teach product thinking and design craft to an early-stage AI startup founder cohort in January 2026.

Invited faculty to teach the Product & Design Studio module for MEST Africa’s Startup AI Program. Works with early-stage African founders at the intersection of product thinking, design craft, and AI.

Invited as a judge for a corporate-backed hackathon/UX festival competition in 2025.

Invited to judge student-led design and technology projects at CITSA Week Hackathon in 2025.

Delivered a TEDx talk on design and technology and the trajectory of African digital product culture.

Invited to speak on design, product, and the evolving BeTech Connected landscape of work in the African technology sector.

Completed an IxDF certification in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Completed an IxDF certification in Information Visualisation: Getting Dashboards Right.

Completed an IxDF certification in Journey Mapping.