I am currently in a software engineering program called ADA. It is targeted at building women in the tech space in different fields both technical and non-technical. It is a 7-month program that has been on, since September 2022.

It has been quite an experience.

The Task

Just last week we concluded our wildfire project. We were paired together in teams to take on a specific project. In each team, we had product managers, data analysts, cloud engineers, frontend/backend engineers, and product designers.

I was in a team of 9 individuals and as the product manager, I was the project lead. I didn’t think it would be as challenging as it eventually got — but I would talk about this later on in this article.

We were tasked with choosing any industry, discovering a problem and providing a panacea to that problem. We chose the real estate industry.

The Product

We discovered that rising rents and property prices will most likely continue to grow in the long run and a large portion of Nigerians could not afford to buy property. We thus set to create a panacea that can make housing more affordable. We conducted user research to validate this problem and then we decided to build our product.

We built a product — a website that aims at solving the problem stemming from the inability to own homes in Nigeria, particularly Lagos state, due to the high cost of these houses in that area. We named it Ultra Homes. Ultra Homes was going to help everyday people purchase houses in installments through our unique rent-to-own marketplace.

The Strategy

I used ClickUp to delegate tasks to every individual responsible for achieving any task and made use of time management applications like Google Calendar and Monday to ensure we were able to meet up with the deadlines. I ensured the brand style guide and product documentation were ready as when due. The designs came in as of when due and when we got feedback from our facilitator, we quickly implemented the corrections.

I made use of the Agile principles, methodology, and framework because we had just 10 days to ideate, create, prototype and test!

I made use of the scrum framework to enable me to follow an iterative and incremental approach to accomplishing the project. It was, however, tasking and at a point, it became a madhouse, as the designers had a squabble with the engineers. This conflict was however resolved as I created a google meeting where our differences were addressed and the team spirit was revived.

The Challenge

Two days towards the end of the sprint, our Frontend engineer took ill and could not deploy our codes successfully to Github — we were stuck! We had everything else on lockdown, even the slides for the demo presentation were ready but we did not have the live project. We had to improvise at the last minute and build Ultra Homes using Shopify! At the end of the day, we had our product which we showcased at the Live Showcase.

Lessons Learned

In class, we were taught that being a product manager generally meant ensuring the product vision is brought to reality by collaborating with all the stakeholders required to do so. Experience however taught me that it is more than this.

I have learned that being a product manager also means being an enabler, a fixer, a critical thinker, a solution architect, and an influencer. Being a product manager entails motivating your team and trusting them to get the job done. It entails effectively communicating the vision of the product consistently and nicely.

I have learned leadership skills, organizational skills and above all patience! It took a lot to be calm in the midst of the storm that came along the way. I am however proud of myself and I can’t wait to put all of these into my first real job as a product manager.