Product Manager Africa (PMAfrica) celebrates World Product Day
On Wednesday 27th May 2020, PM Africa celebrated world product day. To celebrate this, we invited 12 speakers across the African continent to speak about their experience in building awesome tech products. It was a 2-hour session and each speaker had 10mins to introduce themselves, talk about their products and contributions to the product community in Africa. The session started at 5pm and ended at about 7.20pm.
The focus of the webinar was on Africa’s talents and the awesome products that are being built and developed. Speakers were from different countries in Africa. From West Africa — Nigeria, Guinea and Ghana to South Africa, then East Africa — Kenya and Central Africa — Rwanda. And because diverse people are part of building awesome products, we had engineers, product designers, QA testers, product managers and founders on the platform.
The event moderators were Funto Akinbisehin, Founder PMAfrica, Isaac Durotoye, Cofounder PMAfrica and Tobi Otokiti, Founder ProductDive. To have some structure we grouped the speakers into 3, Product Managers, Product Designers + Engineers and Product/Engineering Leads + Founders.
We started the webinar with product managers and QA testers moderated by Tobi, with Adatugo Oyebanji, a Product Manager at a Fintech company- NowNow Nigeria. She started by walking us through her product journey and how she got into the product space, her challenges on the job and the products she’s worked on. Then we went on to Emeka Ehinze, Product Manager/Head Product of Operations at Retailars Technologies; who also talked about what he was doing at his current company as well as his product journey.
Next up was Adetolani Eko, a product manager and co-founder of Vybe — an online dating platform designed to help Africans connect with other Africans both online and offline (he talked extensively about this). The app is available for download on google play store and apple store. And finally, we had Bankole Kolapo, a QA Tester at Softcom who talked about how product managers should involve the other members of the product team.
We then moved on to Product Designers moderated by Isaac, starting with Ayobami Adelugba — Product Designer, Descasio. She talked about testing as a product designer, validating with users and colleagues and making changes from feedback. She also spoke about her relationship with implementation and engineers when implementing designs — what a tricky process!. She Advised that designers should invest in self-development and CEOs should invest in hiring product designers.
Next in our exciting lineup of designers was Elijah Kingson — a product designer with Workforce group — a recruitment and people management platform for FMCG, oil & gas and banks. They work with companies to find talents from on-boarding till when they are hired. He talked about his product design journey and how he discovered his passion with interactions and websites featured by awards, as well as how the role of the product designers’ advocates strongly for the users.
Finally in this segment, we had Richard Rusa — from Rwanda — Head of Product Design at DMM.HeHe Ltd. He talked about how he got into the product design space, how he fell in love with designs — UI/UX and the plentiful research he had to do while also learning how to design. We learned how he grew to be a product design lead with a team of UI/UX designers working closely with the dev team and commercial teams.
We then moved on to engineering leads, product leaders, CEOs and Founders moderated by Funto. What a fascinating day this was!
Aboubacar Douno, Head of Engineering, eHealth — talked about his team composition made up of product designers, engineers, devops and QA. He talked about the company and the products they are currently working on such as Aether, LoMIS Suite and a Covid-19 pandemic response tool. They are working closely with the government in the fight against Covid. They initially built a voice response system for those who had just returned and had self-isolated for 14 days to check their health. They also built the Covid-19 contact tracer app which tracked users who have been in contact with a confirmed positive Covid-19 patient, he also mentioned the lab sample collection data system. In conclusion, he noted the importance of including engineers in ideation and that communication is vital for the success of product teams.
Fiifi Baidoo, Chief Architect — Cloud Port, helping organizations to build solutions. He started his journey as a freelance web developer. He joined an IT consortium to consolidate his product development skills where he built payment solutions. They rolled out collections for banks which enabled people to pay their bills. He studied Google and how they built products and they focused on getting actual people to test their products. He spoke about the process of using design sprints to form a product team, develop the prototype or the MVP, and then support and maintain the product.
Annu Augustine, Founder and CEO NedRock, started off as an engineer and after 10 years moved on to product management. She attended an agile conference and heard about the product owner role and knew it was for her. She had this to say on transitioning to a product role — “it is better transitioning from within the company you work because you gain more respect.” She also expressed the frustrations she felt with the way enterprise products were built. This prompted her to start NedRock — a product management training and consulting initiative. She also mentioned that to create a strong and amazing product, you need more than just the product manager but a strong cross functional product team. Another solution that NedRock helps with is continuous discovery techniques and provision of lots of practical experiences. They also work with a number of accelerated programs and startups, working with founders on what needs to be done.
Tokunbo Fagbamigbe, CEO & Founder, Cotta & Cush, Dufuna — His first product experience was with MTN from the engineering perspective. Never waste a downtime, he said, it’s an opportunity for improvement. It was one of the things he learnt while working with MTN. He worked with many organizations in the UK, Google, BSkyB. etc. He shared his experience as Director of Products at Konga, and stressed that it’s not advisable to try to replicate Silicon Valley in Africa. It’s a different market and despite our population density we should not think it’s our addressable market because of issues such as poverty. He also mentioned talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not. We should research more about our market and users. Spend time with users. Currently working on talent development of software engineers across Africa starting with Nigeria and Zambia.
Finally we had Tom Bruno, Global Product Lead, Google who shared his experience and how he moved into the product role. He works on Adsense, but he started off as a business associate, account manager across the sub saharan market, and UX/digital transformation.
His transition to product management is recent. He spoke about paths to product management and Google careers, finding a mentor and book recommendations.
Paths to product management — Identify what kind of Product Manager you want to be- tech, generalist or business product manager e.g. in Apple — you have to be design centric; Google, Facebook — technical and with Amazon — business oriented.
Be a Generalist — have both a technology and business background.
He spoke a lot about important skills for product managers, finding mentors, and reading a lot. You need to have business acumen — business strategy, ability to draft a good Go-to-market plan — how will you take your product to market, pricing etc…
And we concluded the event with Debz Ogana, our PMAfrica community coordinator giving the vote of thanks.
This is a high level summary of the event but you can get way more! To watch the entire video (exclusive of the first 30 mins) please click here — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m82bSKF5OQs&t=1316s
We planned this event in less than a week!! Yes, even we are amazed at what we achieved. Despite the short time, I will conclude that it was a success because not only did 100 of you attend, the feedback was positive! 128 people registered on our meet-up page which was really exciting and the highest number of attendees since we started hosting online sessions.
We faced a few challenges which I’ll list below:
· We didn’t livestream the event from the beginning and so if you watch the YouTube video, we started streaming about 30mins into the event, I tried to stream but I had no idea the page was loading behind my zoom page and I kept clicking on live stream.. by the time I checked, I had opened multiple instances. Like we would say in Nigeria, wawu!
· Before the event, one of the speakers wasn’t available because we changed the time slot for a few speakers, and it was not good timing for her. Suddenly a speaker that we somehow missed out on had a slot! He was not part of our initial group poster and we had to create a poster for him. A blessing but a scramble too.
· Each speaker had only 10mins to talk about their products and contributions to the product space and most times we went over 10mins because the time was just so short. Too many brilliant nuggets for the time slot!
· There was not enough time to take questions from the audience which was really a shame because a number of people had questions from the speakers which were left unanswered.
· Poor internet connection– sigh… a major 3rd world problem where some of our speakers were cut off midway and some were frozen out due to their network connection.
We have taken all these learnings and we would ensure that our next event is even better and we give you a premium experience. Did you have unanswered questions from the event? Let us know in the comments and we would try to get them all answered.
PMAfrica is proud to showcase Africans in the tech space and we will continue to celebrate and promote diversity. Watch out as we will continue to project Africa to the world!
