Designing Data Systems That Scale
How a Nigerian Analyst Helped a Global Platform Reshape Internal Intelligence.2024
By kehinde Emmanuel
In the increasingly digital-first global economy, companies that master internal data intelligence are not just optimizing performance, they’re transforming their capacity to innovate and lead.
One such case is that of Adam Usman, a Nigerian analytics leader who played a pivotal role at Toptal, a U.S-based remote talent platform renowned for engineering and design excellence. Over a two-year period ending in late 2024, Usman helped architect what insiders call one of the most trusted internal data ecosystems in the remote work space.
“We knew we didn’t just need dashboards,” Usman explained in a virtual roundtable with This Day. “We needed verified intelligence, systems that people could trust across time zones and functions.”
His mandate? To design a data architecture that could support global growth analytics, SEO optimization and customer intelligence, spanning more than 100 countries.
At the center of this effort was a Certified Data Repository (CDR), a system that tracked data lineage, ownership, and certification.
Every metric, from marketing attribution to product engagement was verified at the source. This wasn’t a typical data lake, it was a curated, reliable foundation that leadership could base decisions on.
The approach paid off.
Usman led the creation of an internal SEO intelligence engine powered by a customized variant of Google’s PageRank algorithm.
The model surfaced high-leverage content across Toptal’s digital ecosystem, shaping their content strategy and contributing to measurable gains in organic search rankings by late 2023.
“PageRank isn’t new, but using it to prioritize internal growth content in a distributed business environment? That was a novel application,” noted Dmitry Koshkin a former SEO director at Toptal.
The technology story is only part of it.
Operating in a fully remote company, Usman had to address challenges often overlooked in centralized teams, like creating institutional memory across continents.
Teams in Lagos, New York and Buenos Aires had to interpret numbers the same way, trust the same definitions and move on insights in real time.
To address this, Usman’s team leveraged tools like Looker for team level exploration and Tableau for executive dashboards. But they didn’t stop at tools.
They instituted weekly “data huddles” to foster alignment across marketers, operations leads and engineers. Building shared understanding and cross-functional confidence.
According to insiders, the initiative created a ripple effect. Toptal now uses similar governance standards across other internal platforms, including talent allocation, finance forecasting and customer support analytics.
“Adam’s approach blended technical rigor with a deep sense of usability,” said Dominic Williamson, a marketing director who collaborated with the analytics team. “That’s rare and it made a real difference.”
Born in Nigeria and educated in the United States, Usman is part of a new wave of African data professionals shaping global systems from remote locations. His story demonstrates that strategic impact is no longer limited by geography, it’s unlocked by clarity, execution and vision.2024.
