With most digital products and applications doing well in the market, there is the need to build product managers (PMs) capacity. Against this backdrop, a forum was held in Lagos to equip product managers and train new ones, DANIEL ESSIET reports.
How do successful tech firms, such as Amazon, Inter switch, Paystack and Flutter wave design and develop the products that sell and return millions to investors?
This was the issue addressed by Product Tank MeetUp, a group of aspiring and serving product managers (PM), which held in Lagos.
The first speaker was Paystack Head of Partnerships, Khadijah Abu. She has 10 years’experience in fintech and payments. She had worked in operations, business process re-engineering and product management. She has also managed products processing billions of dollars yearly.
Miss Abu said majority of tech firms spend money to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organisation. This, according to her, is to help them discover and deliver technology products that customers will love.
She maintained that the best firms are built by extraordinary product minds.
She explained that they set the product strategy, designed to achieve the corporate vision and goals as well as manage the marketing and development of the product.
Generally, she explained that the product manager is responsible for the strategy and roadmap of a product or product line and that this may include marketing and forecasting.
She said they also work with other key leaders in engineering, sales, support, and marketing to ensure that their firm builds the right product.
She said the demand for qualified product managers is growing.
As a product manager, she spends most of her time with the development team and customers. While she enjoyed the business side, she wanted to get more hands-on with technology.
She loves the collaboration between her and other departments because she gets to learn something new from her peers daily.
She added that product management has continued to expand as a profession.
Miss Abu said even if one was not a product manager, one could learn strategies that make talented PMs successful.
Other speakers included product luminaries Group Head Payment Processing, Inters witch Group, Ina Alogwu. He started his session with career story.
He explained the five rules of a product manager.
He spoke about the things that are necessary for an evolving product manager, such as understanding the difference between features and user experience and that DevOps collaboration and involvement at the beginning of the product is what gets the work done.
Alogwu said the product team would have an impact on what a firm becomes. He explained that product managers use data to align stakeholders with roadmaps, track efficacy of what’s been built, and prioritise what to build next.
Prior to venturing into technology, he spent some years in management consulting. It’s his job to ensure that developers build new products.
Toyin Oshinowo and Adrian Agho later joined Alogwu and Abu on the panel session.
Oluwatoyin Oshinowo is the Co-founder and Vice President of Product at Fieldinsight, a firm that helps large organisations use data to manage and monitor their distribution assets.
Oshinowo said one major skill of a good product manager is discovering gaps in user experiences and anticipating product flaws through research.
TeamApt Product Manager Adrian Agho, after graduating with a computer science degree from the University of Lagos, worked first as a software developer and later as a product manager.
Switching to product management allowed him to combine multiple loves: building products that improve people’s lives using technology, problem solving, vision setting, exploration, communication, and ideation.
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