I found product management before I knew its name

People sometimes ask how a physics graduate ended up in product management, and I can tell they are expecting a neat answer, a moment of clarity or a five year plan. I don't have one. What I have is a habit of following problems I found interesting, and a moment when I realised the work I had already been doing had a name.

For most of university my goal was simply to graduate, and Industrial Physics at Covenant University kept me busy enough. By final year, though, I wanted more than a degree. I wanted to make something, and that search led me to the Hebron Startup Lab, the school's incubator. The lab had a place for everyone: developers had a community, creatives had a community, and then there was a call for people who were neither technical nor creative, the ones who liked planning, organising, and getting things done. They called us executors.

Reading that description was the first time I saw myself in a role. I couldn't code and I couldn't design, but I could organise people and get an event to happen on time. I spent that final year meeting up every weekend, learning how startups worked, and planning events for the community. Everyone was building a startup then, and if you couldn't build, you found the role that suited you. Through the lab I joined Kelzga, a student logistics startup, where my job was negotiating with established logistics companies so our users could ship reliably.

During the COVID lockdown, the lab community offered a short product management course at a discount, and I signed up. I should be honest about how little I understood. I had heard the title by then, and I could have told you a definition, but I didn't yet see myself in it. What the course really gave me was a dangerous idea, which was that you could build anything.

Hearing a job title and recognising yourself in it turned out to be two very different moments for me, months apart.

A close friend of mine is an artist, and she was struggling to reach buyers beyond her own circle. I was getting into art myself, and it seemed obvious that if you could buy almost anything online, you should be able to buy art from African creatives. So I decided to build a marketplace. I didn't know how to build a website, so I learned WordPress, with a family member sitting beside me and guiding me through it. Along the way I came across escrow, where the buyer pays but the seller only receives the money once the work arrives, and for art bought from a stranger online that felt like the whole selling point. So I tried to integrate Vesicash, an escrow provider.

The integration did not go smoothly. I spent so long going back and forth with their support team that eventually the CEO called me himself to ask what was going on. I explained what I was building, and he told me to reach out when it was done. Not long after that my laptop died, which was unlucky, or perhaps lucky; I still can't decide. With the build stopped, I had nothing to do but look up from it and pay attention to what was happening around me.

What I noticed was a large company starting on something similar, which told me the idea had a future and that I could not win that race alone. So I called the CEO back and offered to bring the idea to his company and build it with them. An idea alone is a thin offer, so I tried to make it stronger first. I found a partner in advertising who was open to the marketplace's art filling billboard space that had no paying advert, and that gave me something real to bring into the conversation.

The CEO was interested, and then he asked the question I had been dreading: what would my role be, and could I code or design? I couldn't do either. In that moment the course came back to me, and for the first time the title I had heard described what I had actually been doing for months. That is how I became a product management intern.

In the end the marketplace didn't survive, because the company's priorities shifted and the project was shelved, and I learned early how quickly a startup has to change direction when the ground moves. I moved onto their core product and eventually started getting paid, and when it was time to look for my next role, I treated the search like a product of its own.

It did not go well at first. Over months I collected more than five hundred rejection emails, and each time the silence went on too long, I reworked my CV and tried again until the interviews started coming. Some of those rejections hurt more than others. What kept me going was a friend who told me to aim for a thousand, because she believed a yes would come long before I got there. For me, it did. When it did, it was from Kudy, and I went with my heart. I loved the culture I saw in those first conversations, and it felt like a place where I could contribute early, learn from people who were moving fast, and grow with the company.

If I were doing that search again, I would do it differently. The younger me treated it as a numbers game, as though enough applications would eventually force a door open, and it did work, but it was a slow and bruising way to get there. The older me would be more tactical. I would stop counting applications and start choosing companies, looking for one I genuinely admired, then working out a problem that actually mattered to that business and showing up with a view on how I would help solve it. That is product thinking applied to my own career, and I only saw it afterwards. I gave my younger brother the same advice when he started looking, and his application ended up at the top of the pile.

Five hundred rejections taught me persistence. They did not teach me to aim, and aiming is the lesson I would pass on.

My first weeks there were a strange mix of intimidation and excitement. I would walk into some meetings feeling as though I had taken on a job far beyond what I could do, and walk out of the same meetings convinced I could do anything. I had no idea where to start, so I did what I had done with the marketplace: I tried to understand the problem first and then break it into smaller pieces I could actually move. Looking back, I can see that I had been doing product work long before anyone called it that, and product management gave those instincts a name and, more importantly, a discipline.

Show Dem Camp's "No Regrets" has been my soundtrack for this kind of looking back. The first time it really landed, I was up late, and it had me questioning my move, my job, and more or less my whole life. Somewhere in that questioning I realised that, if I was honest, I had lived without regret, and that the detours had been the path all along.

No Regrets · Show Dem Camp

Instinct only got me through the door, though, and it was not enough to keep me useful once I was inside. I still had to learn how to write requirements engineers could build from, how to say no to good ideas, how to measure whether something worked, and how to lead people who knew far more than I did about their own craft. Physics helped more than I expected, because it taught me to look at a system, ask what is really driving it, and resist the first explanation that sounds right. It did not teach me how to work with people. That I have had to learn on the job, mostly by getting it wrong first.

The curiosity that got me started is still there, and I hope it never leaves. Most of my work now, though, is the slower part: turning that curiosity into something other people can rely on, week after week, long after the exciting first version has been built.