I don't think anyone ever wakes up in the morning and says, “I want to become a product manager” at least not people who aren't exposed to tech already. My journey to product management is more of a journey of self-discovering and many failed experiments.

Follow your passion?

Ah yes, here we are at this “stupid” advice. I have a love-hate relationship with this advice and as someone who followed his passion, I have some thoughts about this approach. Is this the best approach? Well it depends on how much time you have are willing to invest and how much stability you have in your life. If you don't have much time and no stability then this advice is very stupid. But if you are like me a college dropout who decided to move to a new state to pursue my idealistic passion then sure this approach has its benefits.

Following your passions helps you develop what Naval Ravikant calls “specific knowledge” This is knowledge that can't be taught in school but is often obtained by pursuing your passions/curiosities and educating yourself along the way. This is hard work but it feels like play because you love what you are actively doing.

Solo Entrepreneur

I don't think there are many things in life that can prepare you for the journey of becoming a solo creative entrepreneur trying to make money being a creative on the internet and 2021 is my fifth year since I decided to begin my journey of running and building a community brand and a design agency, Senpai. I started my journey as a mobile photographer with an iPod and had to pick up a lot of skills along the way because no one was going to come help my build my company.

I picked up graphic design because from photography, that was the next natural progression. At the same time i was also learning branding I went into logo design and designed the current logo for Senpai. UI/UX was the next step as I wanted to build a website, I had to convince my mom to enroll me in Design Lab back in 2016, I took their design 101 course.

I worked with a hand full of clients but I honestly either fucked up the job opportunity because I was “feeling good about it” ( this is an inpf problem ) or I just turned down the job or in some extreme cases return the clients money. I was more concerned about building my community and learning new things than using that time to work with clients on unfufilliling work, even though I was broke.

More failed experiments Later

I continued learning new things and working on all sorts of random gig every now and then, At this point, I had also picked up coding and was able to build a website for Senpai. This opened me up to more ideas and opportunities so I decided to build my first product, Shoply, Which I started but got stuck and felt like a fraud and I gave up.😅. i thought to myself “are you even a developer?”

Senpai Academy

I had been using the knowledge I learned from design 101 to train and mentor people on design and I had done a lot of 1–1 trainings and had a few people intern at my one-man company, read dami’s story here. So I decided to scale it up and with the help of Dami and my good friend and teammate for a few weeks Abigiel, we launched an online training course. This was a free course and was literally just a landing page to collect emails and user information and a whatsapp group for communicating with the students and content was sent via email every week to the students. Its important to mention that the course was structure like this because a lot of people rather chat on whatasapp than slack in Nigeira and sending the course content as emails also made it easier for everyone to get access to the content in a familiar environment like emails.

The first batch of students who took this course was over 400 and a lot of them are now design leaders in the tech ecosystem in Nigeria this is one thing I am really proud off. This was my first real product and at the time I didn't see it as such, I just wanted to impact my community. After the first 2 batched I decided to try making it a paid course and to my surprised someone paid, not just someone but I handful of people about 24. This was the first time I had ever made money from the internet and this happened at I time where people in Nigeria, weren't used to paying for things online.

make a dollar on the internet and it would change your life — Jack Butcher

So after a few more updates to the website, which I did myself, I ended up with Senpai Academy.

Shoply 2.0

After more years of getting comfortable with coding and taking on a few more failed client projects I decided to take a “break” from Senpai and focus on developing myself I had built a very solid brand for my company by my personal brand on non exsistent. I was very bad at sales, I made very little money and I wasn't nesaecarily very good at any one thing, I was what you might call an extreme generalist. 2020 was a really chill year for me as I used it to reflect on my personal brand and what values I truly bring to the market, I also used the first quarter of the year to try building Shoply again. Which I did and actually got a few early users. This was probably the hardest thing I've ever had to build as I had to use a lot of javascript and learned a lot about actually building an MVP, the kinds of things you can only learn if you have built one. I was soo emotional about building this that I actually broke down into tears after I launched the product, I couldn't believe I did it. I had push passed my developer imposter syndrome.

What can I be the best at?

My company Senpai is a passion project and it really can't bring much revenue right now without a lot of investment needed to keep the boat afloat so I decided to focus on myself and maybe get a job so I can have money to take care of my needs and also to invest into building Senpai. This search eventually lead me to discovering product management, throughout my journey, I have been hearing of the term product manager/project management and in fact I had even worked on some gigs as a project manager but it just never occurred to me that I could classify myself as a product manager or rather I didn't have any need too at the time. It was January 2021 that a fully realized that I have a lot of the skills needed to be a product manager. I am an entrepreneur, UI/UX designer and have a solid understanding of how to code and build a product. In fact I had built a couple of products in the past mostly out of following my passions.

I needed something I could be the best at, that I loved doing, and that could pay me and I found that in product management. During my many interactions and failed experiments I didn't really have a solid brand, most of my clients didn't really know exactly was I did or what my strength were and that lead to a very big problem of not having any form of credibility. But that is all changing this year.

The birth of the Unicorn Product Manager 🦄

I have a deep understanding of myself and I know that once multiple things I value connect and makes sense to me I run with it and don't look back and being a product manager connects with a lot of my strengths and values in ways that make it seem like I was destined to stumble into this path. They often say there are 3 types of product managers. I think there are a few more

1. The Design PM
2. The Engineering PM
3. The Business PM
4. The Product Marketing Manger
5. The Data Driven PM

My skills and experience allow me to combine these five in ways most other people are incapable of. I love business, I love Design, I love listening to users and solving their problems, I love building things with code and I am a creative and community builder at heart. This is just the start of my career as a PM and Yes I am a unicorn product manager

Final Thoughts

• There are many paths in life yours won't be the same as others
• I truly believe following your heart and passion is the best thing you can do
• Find things you can be the best at and focus most of your energy on those things. 80/20 baby 😉
• Being a generalist is good but being a specialist pays the bills
• be like water
• Remember to breathe 😊