Refine Labs’ Post

I'm currently reflecting on the journey I've been on so far as a Product Manager during the Co.Lab BootCamp! Over the past week, I've had the privilege of working with an amazing Co.Lab 🚀 joincolab.io product team as their product manager, facilitating some ideation, research, and validatation of our product ideas. From exploring problem spaces to conducting user research, including user interviews, surveys and market research, it’s been a fulfilling experience. This week of our bootcamp has already validated some hypotheses for me about what a career in product management would be like, by living it as a prototype experiment! My key takeaway from this week? To build a valuable product, you need to balance its desirability, feasibility, and usability in development. That requires sharing ideas with diverse perspectives from a product team of designers, developers and product manager. I’ve learned to dig deep into user needs, challenge assumptions, and ensure that every step we take is grounded in data and insights. I’m proud of the progress we’ve made so far as a team and the solutions we’re building together. A huge shoutout to my talented teammates—Ayomikun Obayomi, Anthony Hernandez, Nicolas, and Maurquise—for their dedication to showing up for daily 2-hour idea-sharing and development sessions. Together, we’re learning step-by-step that collaboration and innovation can turn great ideas into impactful products. Excited to continue this journey and bring more innovative products to life as a product manager for products and ideas I care about! #ProductManagement #ProductDevelopment #UserResearch #Leadership #Innovation #TechCareers

As I reach the midpoint of week 3 in the #SPRINT30 cohort with Co.Lab 🚀 joincolab.io, Kettering’s words have resonated deeply with me. This statement, as straight forward as it seems, has been a guiding principle throughout my journey. Being naturally solution-oriented, my instinct is to jump straight into solving problems. However, I’ve had to learn to pause and spend more time defining the problem and conducting user research to truly understand my users' pain points. Through interviews, I’ve been able to empathize with users and uncover their motivations. This experience highlighted the importance of user research in shaping a clear and actionable problem statement. Whether you’re a Product Manager, transitioning into Product Management, or experiencing the shift from a solution-focused to problem-oriented approach, I’d love to connect! #ProductManagement #Product #CoLab #SPRINT30 #JoinCoLab #YouBelongInTech #ProductManagementJourney #UserInterviews #UserExperience #ProductDevelopment #BuildInPublic

Week 3 of Co.Lab 🚀 joincolab.io 🚀 complete!! ✅ This week I focused on completing my Product Spec! Some of my key learnings are below: 📌 Clear, Concise & Importance The purpose of a product spec is to communicate the problem space, your user, and why this problem you choose to tackle is important to solve. It aims to drive clarity for the team, define the impact of the work, drive decisions, and enable shared understanding. While writing my product spec, I emphasized the importance of my problem through concise and empathetic language. I included my research findings, goals, and user stories to drive clarity of my problem space and requirements. I learned that as a Product Manager we are responsible for ensuring that our team and all stakeholders are aligned with the requirements and purpose of our product. Any PM should be able to pick it up and understand right away the problem and why it’s important to solve! 📌 Focus on the what not the how As Product Managers are role in a cross-functional team is to define a clear product vision and to help ensure our team makes progress against the product roadmap. Typically while writing the solution space of the product spec, this is done in collaboration with your designers and developers. Our job is to ensure that the designers and developers have a clear understanding of the problem and scenarios of the user stories so that they can implement a solution for these functionalities. By focusing on the what, we drive successful decision making and collaboration between all members in our team to determine the minimum viable product that incorporates just enough features to satisfy our customer segment! Big shoutout to Didier Lopez and Netel Murray for all the valuable feedback; my product spec is looking 10x better!! Also, I’m excited to read all the feedback from my mentor Jagmeet Cheema so that I can continue to develop my product spec!! Thank you Helen Huang 🥕 and Sefunmi Osinaike for another awesome week, and my #SPRINT28 cohort for the constant support 😊 This week is the home stretch of the sprint where I’ll submit my product portfolio and presentation!! #youbelongintech #productmanagement #learnbydoing

Are you a techie interested in tackling challenges all by yourself? We have exciting news! You can now take up a challenge solo and solve them independently!🤭 You don’t need a team to assemble and get the work done. If you’re a developer or product manager looking to push your limits and level up your game, this is for you! Head over to our dashboard right now! If you haven’t signed up, link in our bio! #TechChallenges #SoloDeveloper #ProductManager #TechCommunity #SkillUp #LevelUp #DeveloperLife #TechNews #Innovation #SoloTech

Cultivating innovation within my teams is one of my passions. It can be hard to carve out time to make this happen, but it might be easier than you think, like: ⭐️ Experimenting with a revolving door of tools and discussing my findings with the team. I also make it clear that I want my teams to do the same. ⭐️ Setting a company objective of 40 hours per person per year (at a minimum) for learning about things that might improve our work and product — including me! ⭐️ Carving out a few days a year to host hackathons like DevFest so we can all collaborate and present new product feature ideas. These are things we do at Contentstack, but I’m always searching for more ways to help my team come up with new ideas and brainstorm. What do your teams do? I also wrote more about how to champion innovation within your teams – specifically developers – in a Contentstack blog below. #innovation #product #tech #techcommunity

Week 1 of Co.Lab 🚀 joincolab.io complete!! ✅ This week I focused on finding important problems, exploring problem spaces, writing problem statements, customer segments, and creating a research plan. Some of my key learnings are below: 📌 "55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions" - Albert Einstein This quote was a replay everytime I thought about my problem space. Coming from a very solution driven mindset, it took sometime to rewire my brain to keep asking "what problem is this actually solving". I found myself asking this multiple times throughout the week, focusing in on things that don't change, which helped me narrow down my problem space to a specific personal problem that I encounter. 📌 Solve a personal problem - you'll end up solving millions of peoples problems in the process Choosing to narrow down my problem space to a personal problem that I encounter is benefical since I'm already empatizing with the user. Being user-centric helps me understand and uncover important problems that need fixing. If i'm frustrated with a certain workflow, there sure are other people feeling the same frustrations as me. 📌 Don't ask your mom if this is a good idea My mom is my number 1 fan and she would want me to succeed in anything I do, meaning she would give encouragment for any idea I come up with. But as Product Manager we should not be receiving validation from our moms nor anyone in general. It's our responsibility to validate our problem through user interviews. I prepared a list of questions with an aim to understand the users motivations, experience, needs, and pain points. I will be conducting interviews next week and am eager to discover whether I receive validation. If not, the insights gained will enable me to better understand their needs and offer solutions to their problems. Big shoutout to Sefunmi Osinaike and Helen Huang 🥕 for all the guidance this week, my #SPRINT28 cohort for the support, and to all the Mama's out there for being our biggest fans 😊 Next week i'll perform my first user interview and start my Product Spec! #youbelongintech #productmanagement #learnbydoing

Hello 👋 everyone 🏆 I've just completed my first week as a Product Manager at Co.Lab 🚀 joincolab.io #Collab27 cohort . Over the 8-week program, I'll be collaborating with my amazing team, including: 🎨 - Jenny Ngo, Product Designer 🛠 - Thomas Garrett , Full Stack Dev ⚙ - Sebastien Dupont , Full Stack Dev 📆 During Week 1, our focus was on defining a problem. We explored four different problem spaces, including music streaming, cooking, automating business processes, and fitness. After extensive brainstorming sessions, we ultimately decided to focus on the fitness domain. 📝 We learned about - Establishing agile practices.    - The importance of fostering and maintaining psychological safety within our team—an essential component for cultivating high-performing agile teams.    - Setting guardrails when defining the problem space. 🙏 Many thanks to the team at Co.Lab 🚀 joincolab.io Sefunmi Osinaike Helen Huang 🥕 and our mentor Keyuri Anand for her invaluable insights and advice. If you share a passion for designing, building, and launching products, feel free to reach out—I'd be thrilled to connect! #productdevelopment #productmanagement #users #buildinpublic

WHEW!!! Just hit week two of soaking up that Product brain vibe. The role of a PE is packed with a wide range of tech and understanding user needs. There's so much information and so many goals, which is cool but honestly, a bit much to take in. 🤯 To tackle this, I started organizing and prioritizing my objectives into clear checkpoints. Product Evolution: - understanding RELATIONSHIP with users - how the team identifies customer PROBLEMS and pain points - PRIORITIZING and addressing these issues - gaining INSIGHTS from the initial product roadmap Product Ecosystem: Exploring the parent products to assess the product's lineage and how it fits within the larger ecosystem provides valuable context. 🌍 Key Takeaways? Whether you are a developer, a project manager, or aspiring to see the product vision, understanding the broader perspective fosters innovation and impactful solutions. Feel free to reach out if you have questions or insights to share. Let's learn and grow together! 🙌 #product #productengineering #productmindset #womenintech #MissTech

ProductX was an amazing experience for me in the last couple of days. I heard from professional product managers about their areas of expertise, the obstacles they have faced, and their way of overcoming or failing and learning from failure. It was fascinating and inspiring. As a junior beginning my journey into the product world, it provided me with a valuable opportunity to grow and learn. Here are some of my takeaways from ProductX: 1. Choose my metrics carefully and think deeply about their connection to my goals and strategies, without automatically leaping to the obvious "hows", but focusing on the "what's". Thanks, Guy Mordecai for this open-minded speech. 2. Discovering the product way of making lemonade out of a lemon, by Oren Lewkowicz, and how to adjust to market changes and leverage them to my benefit. 3. Examining trending technologies, such as AI, without falling in love with the concept, but rather checking their necessity for the product. As Julia Diament said, "AI isn't magic," and Hadas Sheinfeld and Edik Mitelman debated and presented different perspectives on how to approach new trends. As Julia Diament recognized the loss of our loved ones during the 7.10, I felt inspired to make our work even more meaningful and impactful. Thank you for giving me this insight. Looking forward to the next event, thank you for this opportunity! #ProductX #productmanagement #growthopportunities #inspiration

🌟 5 Years of Growth, Learning & Passion 🌟 Today, I celebrate 5 incredible years of my professional journey—one that started on September 23, 2019, and has been filled with learning, challenges, and growth. Starting out at VAYUZ Technologies built a strong foundation, where I learned everything from scratch, and I’m truly grateful for that opportunity. My time at GeekyAnts has been even more enriching—progressing from BA to Sr. BA, and handling roles like AM and BA simultaneously. Collaborating across teams including Development, Sales, and Marketing has expanded my perspective and skills, and I appreciate the experiences and insights gained along the way. Here are my ✨ Top Takeaways from 5 Years of Milestones ✨ 📚 Focus on learning: Explore different aspects of your role to uncover what you excel at and where you can grow. 💡 Love what you do: I genuinely love what I do, and that’s what has helped me thrive over the years! It’s natural to have a couple of responsibilities that aren’t your favourite, and that’s completely okay - passion for your work makes all the difference! ⏳ Find time for yourself: Whether it’s reading, traveling, or simply relaxing—balance is key to staying energised. 🚀 Upgrade your skills: Stay curious and keep evolving! This mindset led me to develop foundational skills beyond my day-to-day responsibilities as a BA, including UI/UX, Figma, and diving into Product Management.. 🔜 What’s next? The journey of growth and learning continues—exciting things are on the horizon. Stay connected to find out what’s next! . . . . . #ProfessionalJourney #CareerMilestones #KeepLearning