An interview with Princess Akari. Princess is a product manager at Brass where she's helping to disrupt the Nigerian banking industry. She's also passionate about supporting local product managers & standing up for the very value of product management via her community PeopleInProduct, the "Alcoholics Anonymous of Product Management".
We talk about a lot, including:
- Her day job as a product manager building mobile applications for a disruptive fintech, and how they're taking on the banking industry in Nigeria
- Why someone who starts out with a degree in civil engineering and a job as a structural engineer subsequently moves into product management
- Her journey into product management, how it was difficult to get community support to ease the transition and how this gave her the idea to start up her own community
- The mission behind PeopleInProduct and how they aim to be a warm, inclusive community where people can share their issues & doubts but also celebrate their successes
- The problem with many Nigerian product companies not really understanding the value of product management, and how that manifests itself in the financial packages and the respect they're given
- How she feels that there's a need product managers to be more explicit about the value they're creating for the company & standing up for themselves
- How everything's always worse for women, how they're discouraged from coding or design and forced into "easy" product management jobs, and then struggle to get their voices heard once they're in there
And much more!
Check out PeopleInProduct
If you like the sound of PeopleInProduct and want to join in, or maybe use it as inspiration to set up your local version, why not check out PeopleInProduct?
Contact Princess
You can reach out to Princess on Twitter, LinkedIn. She also writes on Medium.