African Women in Tech Leadership

A working circle for African women in senior engineering, product, design, and technical leadership roles. The room where staff+ engineers, product VPs, design directors, engineering managers, and CTOs talk to each other about the work they are actually doing. Not the public-conference version. The internal version.

Membership includes African and African-diaspora women across senior individual-contributor and management tracks. Across Lagos, Nairobi, Cape Town, London, Berlin, Toronto, the Bay Area, Atlanta, New York, and the long list of cities where we are doing this work. Across companies — early-stage startups, mid-stage growth companies, public-company engineering organizations, big-tech, and the unicorns. Across the African tech ecosystem and the global tech ecosystem.

What we talk about. Strategic decisions. The architecture decisions you are carrying alone on a team where you are the senior IC. The hiring strategy for the next twelve months. The compensation banding you are about to roll out and how to do it equitably. The reorg you are running and what is at stake. The cross-functional politics with product, design, and legal. The board update you have to give next week. The all-hands you have to host on Friday.

Hiring senior ICs. The decision criteria you have built for staff and principal engineers. The interview loop design. The compensation negotiation work for senior offers. The specific dynamics for senior Black women candidates who are evaluating your team — what they will look for, what will make them say no, what will make them say yes. The responsibility you carry for being the recruiter and being the example, simultaneously.

Performance management. The promotion packets you are writing for your reports. The performance review you are delivering this week to a senior engineer whose work has slipped. The PIP conversation. The performance review you are receiving from your own manager and how to respond to it. The calibration meetings and what gets said in the room and what does not.

Compensation. Your own compensation as a senior woman. The negotiation for your last raise, your last role transition, your last board seat. The data on compensation gaps for Black women in tech, at every level, and how it has affected your own trajectory. The conversation about equity, vesting, and the long-term wealth-building implications of the compensation decisions you make on behalf of your team.

The IC-to-leader transition. The work of leaving an individual contributor role for a management role and the way that has reshaped your day. The work of going from engineering manager to director to VP. The decision about whether to stay on the IC track at the staff or principal level instead. The way those tracks are valued differently in different companies and how to read the signals.

The founder track. Members who are running their own startups. The fundraising work — seed, Series A, Series B, Series C, growth equity. The cap-table conversations with your co-founders. The board composition. The exit conversations. The specific dynamics of African founders raising from international investors and the specific dynamics of African-diaspora founders raising from US-based investors. The way Black women founders are evaluated and what we have learned about how to present ourselves in those rooms.

The technical politics. The architecture review where your reasoning was strong and the room did not listen. The decision that you reversed under pressure that you should not have reversed. The decision that you held against pressure that you should have held. The slow accumulation of pattern recognition for when to fight and when to step back.

The platform politics. Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, conference circuits, podcasts. The decision about how much to engage publicly with the tech-industry discourse. The costs of visibility and the costs of invisibility. The way our public profile interacts with internal company politics. The way our public profile interacts with our career capital across the long arc.

The international work. African members building in the continental tech ecosystem. The funding landscape and the specific funds that are active. The regulatory environment in specific countries. The talent market. The relationships between continental tech and global tech, including the way some global companies have invested on the continent and the way that investment has gone well or badly.

The mentorship work. The senior women in this room who are mentoring early- and mid-career African women in tech across various contexts. The way we coordinate, the way we share patterns, the way we close gaps between what mentees are getting from different mentors. The structured mentorship programs some members have built inside their own companies and in the broader ecosystem.

Cadence: a daily channel for fast technical and political questions. A weekly long-form thread on a single strategic topic. A monthly virtual roundtable. A quarterly closed-door in-person session for senior members on the specific structural problems that come at our level. An annual retreat with limited cap and rigorous engagement expectations.

Membership rules. Confidentiality on hiring, compensation, and internal company information is absolute. No screenshotting. No recruiting blasts. Targeted individual outreach for roles is welcome; broad recruitment posts are not. Member-on-member mentorship is encouraged.

What we are: the senior peer group African women in tech leadership have rarely had before, organized as a working group rather than as a network event. We share strategy. We share patterns. We hold each other through the harder decisions. We help each other negotiate compensation and title at parity. We bring each other up. We are building the next generation of senior African women in tech leadership by being the example and being the mentors and being each other's peers at the level we are now at. That is the point of the circle.