When you think of product management and law, they may seem like two distinct fields with little overlap. However, Adeboro Odunlami’s unique combination of legal expertise and product management skills has led to a highly successful career in which she bridges the gap between ethical product development and legal compliance.
Adeboro’s journey is inspiring. She has merged two seemingly different disciplines into a seamless and impactful career. Her work centres on ensuring that products are not only innovative but also ethically sound and legally compliant. Throughout her career, she’s led products from conception to launch, always keeping user needs at the forefront while ensuring that legal frameworks are followed to avoid potential pitfalls.
A career built on trust and safety
Adeboro doesn’t fit the mould of a typical product manager. Her career moves at the intersection of law and technology, with a specific focus on trust, safety, and user rights. “I’m a product manager, but I’m not the typical traditional product manager,” she explains. “I focus on trust and safety and on users’ rights to ensure that every product, whether it’s a platform or an app, is ethically sound and legally compliant.”
Her commitment to ethics and compliance stems from her deep understanding of law and how it interacts with technology.
Early exposure to Technology and Law
Adeboro’s journey into the tech world began while studying law at university, where she developed an interest in technology. “I started doing internships. I worked at Hotels.ng while still in school, and later at Fonebase Labs, where I got hands-on experience with cutting-edge products,” she recalls.
At Fonebase Labs, Adeboro had the chance to work on innovative products like WriteRack, a platform that allowed users to tweet beyond the character limit (before Twitter introduced threads). She also helped build a cloud-based call centre for businesses. This experience was invaluable, not just for the technical skills she gained but also for shaping her holistic approach to product management.
While Adeboro immersed herself in the world of tech, she also studied law. For her final-year project, she combined both fields by focusing on the right to privacy in emerging technologies. This intersection of legal principles and technical innovation formed the foundation of her career.
Fighting for user safety and privacy
Throughout her career, Adeboro has advocated for user safety and privacy. Early on in her tech journey, she noticed that many products were being developed without considering privacy, security, and user safety from the start. “Whenever I was in the tech space, I noticed nobody was asking: How safe is this for users? Do they actually want it? Are we building privacy into it from the start?”
Her background in law helped her raise these questions, and it shaped her approach to product management, where she integrated privacy by design into the development process. “For me, it’s about making sure that trust and safety are baked into the product from day one.”
A vision for the future of Technology and Law
In recent years, Adeboro has become increasingly focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and product development. She observes how Africa has historically been somewhat sidelined in global conversations about emerging technologies. Today, however, she’s encouraged by the growing engagement with AI discussions across African tech ecosystems.
Adeboro predicts a future where the explainability of AI-driven decisions will become a central focus, especially in regulated sectors like healthcare, fintech, and HR tech. She believes that while many companies are focused on AI adoption to drive efficiency, they will soon face pressure to ensure transparency in their AI-driven decisions. “We won’t have a future where companies can simply say, ‘AI made that decision,’ without being able to justify it,” she argues.
For Adeboro, this means that AI’s explainability will need to be central to the development of technology, especially in contexts where people’s rights are at stake. Companies will need to demonstrate how automated systems reach conclusions, ensuring that these decisions are not biased and are understandable to both users and regulators.
Human moderation and the risks of overreliance on AI
Another aspect of AI that Adeboro is passionate about is human-in-the-loop moderation. Despite the growing role of AI in content moderation, Adeboro believes that human oversight will remain essential for ensuring user safety. She points to recent changes in Meta’s content moderation approach as an example of how AI has played a role. However, human moderators are still needed to maintain a balance between efficiency and empathy.
“At the end of the day, we need community. We need human moderation,” Adeboro asserts.
In her view, while AI holds tremendous potential, there are also risks, such as overreliance on automation, the erosion of critical thinking, bias amplification, and the spread of misinformation. Rather than fearing these risks, Adeboro advocates for a proactive approach to mitigation. “The focus should be on mitigation; fairness audits, privacy impact assessments, maintaining human oversight, staying updated on laws, and encrypting data. It’s not about stopping AI but ensuring it’s deployed responsibly.”
Impactful projects and accomplishments
Throughout her career, Adeboro has worked on various products, focusing on increasing safety, reducing risk, and ensuring compliance. She shared one of her proudest moments: “Across every product I’ve worked on—Callbase, Fonenode, WriteRack, Zeroth Cloud—the goal has always remained the same: increasing safety, reducing risk, and ensuring compliance.”
A personal project that stands out for Adeboro is Lawbrella, a proprietary platform designed with privacy-by-design principles. Lawbrella connects survivors of technology-facilitated gender-based violence with pre-legal support. This isn’t just another platform; it’s a lifeline for those at risk. According to Adeboro, this is the kind of impact that tech can have when it’s built with empathy and ethical safeguards.”
Lawbrella’s high-standard privacy protections also include using image hashing to protect sensitive evidence. “If a survivor uploads an image, we don’t store it in its original form. We use image hashing to create a cryptographic representation that can’t be reverse-engineered. Even if our systems were compromised, no sensitive images could be accessed.”
Policy advocacy and digital rights
Beyond her technical work, Adeboro has actively contributed to the development of policies safeguarding digital rights. She played an integral role in the Digital Rights and Freedom Bill, a groundbreaking piece of legislation seeking to strengthen privacy and internet freedoms.
She also provided expert commentary to the US Bureau of Industry and Security on proposed cybersecurity regulations, ensuring that global policies are informed by real-world risks. Through her work with the Governance and Innovation Network for Generating Enhanced Regulation, Adeboro continues to work towards smarter, more adaptive regulations that balance innovation with ethical accountability.
A future of ethical product development
As Adeboro reflects on her journey and the work she’s done so far, her optimism for the future shines through. She envisions a world where more digital technology companies prioritise hiring or collaborating with trust and safety product managers. A world where product managers, in addition to focusing on revenue and growth, place equal importance on the ethical soundness and safety of the products they build.
“Technology is probably one of the best things that have happened to humanity, but it can also be one of the worst,” she says. “The thin line between that is how safe we make our products and how much we think, not just about the product, but about the people who are using it.”
For Adeboro, people are always the most important part of the product. She is committed to ensuring that technology not only thrives but also serves the well-being of its users. “I’m happy for all the work I’ve done helping tech companies build products that are fair, safe, and non-harmful. I look forward to a time when more companies, especially in Africa, focus on building responsible products.”
With her unwavering commitment to ethics in tech, Adeboro is paving the way for a future where technology truly works for everyone, creating a safer and more inclusive digital world.
