Designing the Layer System Behind Nigeria’s Civil Service Performance Platform

Overview

The Nigerian Civil Service has roughly 720,000 officers across ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs) and they form a chain that begins at the presidency and ends with a junior officer in a unit.

I led the design of the full Performance Management System for the civil service, acting as Product Manager, AI-UX Strategist, and Lead Designer

This project covered goal setting, appraisals, disputes, improvement plans, and administration. However, this case study zooms in on just one part, which is the layer structure.

Our goal with layering was simple: build a dynamic hierarchy, so anyone at any level can come in and work effectively, even if a layer or four is added or removed.

I got to the drawing board.

Why structure is a business problem

A performance tool is only as useful as its picture of the organisation. Get the hierarchy wrong and targets, appraisals, and reports all go to the wrong people.

Then there was a bigger question. Could the same product serve a state government, a parastatal, or a private company with three layers instead of eight?

If the structure was hard-coded, every new customer would mean a new build. If it was configurable, every new customer could build out the right organogram.

This made the layering structure the product's growth lever.

To begin, how do we define success?

Acting as PM, I set out what we would measure:

1. Time to set up an organisation: how long an admin takes to build their full structure.
2. Zero custom builds: new organisations onboard without engineering changes to the hierarchy.
3. Time to reach any office: how quickly a leader gets from their overview to the office they care about.
4. Visibility errors: how often someone sees work they should not. The target is zero.

Thinking in layers

I started on paper. At its fullest, the civil service looks like this:

Presidency → OHCSF → Ministry → Department → Unit → Division → Supervisor → Officer

Like an onion, the number of layers can change. Each layer below the OHCSF can also spread horizontally, with many ministries under the OHCSF and many departments under each ministry.

Two rules came out of these sketches. First, visibility flows downward only, so offices on the same level never see each other's work. Second, the smallest structure must work as well as the largest. A head of product with two officers is still a valid organisation.

Same pattern, every level

The Presidency sees every office it manages as a card. A minister sees their own offices the same way.

So one recursive pattern could serve every role. The top layers, which are the Presidency and the OHCSF, get tabs that separate ministries, extra-ministerial departments, and agencies.

Clicking a card opens up that level and everything underneath it.

Insights by AI

Because every office follows the same structure, AI can read any of them the same way. I specified an AI insights panel at every layer, so a leader can ask in plain language how an office is performing, where it is falling behind, and what to fix.

The structure also keeps those answers safe, because the AI only sees what that layer is allowed to see.

The conclusion of the matter

The layer system turned a rigid government hierarchy into a configurable product. The same architecture serves an eight-layer civil service and a three-layer company.

I think flexibility is the future.