Eko Innovation Product School. Product Manager career path.

1. Think Like a
Product Manager

2. 2
Ibrahim Keji
Fintech and Payment nerd with over
15 years experience in the Product
management space.
A startup advisor, Product
management mentor and digital
transformation expert.

3. Objectives
Major take-home from the session will include:
⊚ Understanding the fundamental of Product Mindsets
⊚ Understanding the end goal for adopting the Product
Mindsets
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4. 4
“Uneasy Lies the head
that wears the crown”
A Product Manager role comes with
heavy demand from internal and
external stakeholders.

5. The Worry List of a Typical PM
⊚ User’s Pain Point
⊚ User Experience
⊚ Shipping Features
⊚ Competitive landscape
⊚ Team efficiency
⊚ Market Opportunities
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⊚ Systems and Processes
⊚ Revenue and Profitability
⊚ Fund raising
⊚ Growth
⊚ Many More

6. 6
Considering the heavy demand on
Product Managers, success or
failure is determined by employing
the right mindsets to building
products.

7. 7
Fundamental Mindsets of a PM
Product
Manager
Exploration
EvangelismImplementation
Analysis

8. 8
Explorer’s Mindset
Great Product Managers seeks push
their products beyond the current
frontiers of technology.

9. ⊚ Innovation is one of the most important factors in highly
successful products.
⊚ PM have the guts and boldness to their the product team into
uncharted waters.
⊚ The drive to try what no one has tried before to achieve a result
no one has achieved yet.
Goal
Continuous innovation: Keep giving customers a better
experience and more value
Exploration
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10. “If I had asked people what
they wanted, they would
have said faster horses.”
– Henry Ford
Innovation is meeting the needs
people didn’t know they have
until you show it to them.
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11. 11
Analyst’s Mindset
PMs can extract insights from numbers
and trends then use them as premises
for informed actions.

12. ⊚ Customer and Market understanding is key to successful
products.
⊚ PM seeks to gain understanding from both internally (Product)
and externally (Market) generated data.
⊚ Analyst thinks in numbers and makes sense of every digit.
⊚ Sometimes, the best insights are not quantitative in nature,
rather they are qualitative.
Goal
Understanding and Informed decisions
Analysis
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13. “Analytics should
change what you do,
not just how you do it.”
– Brian Balfour
PM looks to analytics to get
direction through a product
lifecycle.
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14. 14
Implementer’s Mindset
The speed of execution is vital to the
efficiency of a product teams.

15. ⊚ Execution is the PM’s super power.
⊚ Great product strategy often fail due to poor execution
approach.
⊚ The execution mindset help PM think through the feasibility and
materialization of their strategies and ideas.
⊚ Speedy execution changes the game in a fast moving market.
Goal
Speedy delivery of features and offering.
Implementation
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16. “Culture Eats Strategy for
Breakfast.”
- Peter Drucker
Execution require an high level
of discipline which has to be
ingrained into the culture of the
product team.
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17. 17
Evangelist’s Mindset
PMs are strong believers in their
products. They believe in what their
products represent and are ashamed to
share it with everyone that cares.

18. ⊚ Communicating the Product Vision and values to the
stakeholders is the PMs prerogative.
⊚ PM seeks every opportunity to seed in the product vision in the
minds of the product team, Management and Customers.
⊚ Product evangelism starts with the “Why”.
Goal
Keep team motivated and inspire customer loyalty
Evangelism
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19. “Evangelism is selling a
dream”
- Guy Kawasaki
PMs hold their products as dear
as a religion. The herculean task
is passing this same faith to all
stakeholders.
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