The Product Management Team 6 is made up of 5 delectable ladies and 2 gentlemen: Thassan(yours faithfully) the team lead, Rita (Assistant team lead), Laura, KBM, Favour, Mary and Valerie. Come on and let me take you on my experience of the first week of the Side Hustle Bootcamp.

Sweet & Sour Monday

My 1st week as the team lead for Product Management Team -6 at the SH cohort 7 boot camp started off like a sweet-sour taste. On Monday (the first official day of the boot camp) I literarily developed dreadlocks (dada) on top of my skin-cut o! Nomination and a poll was done to select the team lead and assistant team lead on Sunday the previous night. The polling was poor as only 3 cast their vote, and the rest didn't even respond. Monday morning, the task dropped gbam! We were required to develop a Product Requirement Document (PRD), this was to be done in collaboration with a Product design team. As I tried to find which Product Design (PD) team we were paired with, it was a struggle walai, as our team was rejected at first "In my mind I said, abi you dey play", then I prepared my mind for negotiation and counter-negotiation (I don dey channel my inner Tony Elumelu; maybe he doesn't know what is going on?). So, I tendered my submission in 3 sentences:1- Oga Ade, Drey (If you know Drey, na him carry us come here) paired us together o, so this was sealed union for this week unless otherwise stated by Drey, 2- there were more PM teams than PD, so you will definitely have more than 1 PM team to work with, the 3- was an appeal to his emotions, you are PD-6 we are PM-6, this is probably the greatest pairing you could have gotten. So, he didn't have any choice after my playful and pleading statements (you can call it a sermon Sha!) he agreed. As if that was not enough, only 1 to 3 other members of my team replied to the messages. Out of the 4 sef, 3 were active 1 was not active fa! All of these took the whole day. So, Monday ended with a worried and unsure feeling and thinking (what have I gotten myself into like dis?). Although it started off with a sour taste, it ended with a sweet taste. The wins were;

1. A new chat group was formed with the first 4 members.

2. We agreed on a PRD by one of us and adapted it to ours.

3. We also noted and outlined what needed to change in the PRD,

4. We urged everyone to go through the product school blog guide on how to write a PRD attached by Drey to get further clarifications on what is needed to be done.

Refreshing Tuesday

Stemming from the sweet wins we had on Monday, Tuesday came as a refreshing day, where everything was falling into place. There was a call for a meeting to discuss the PRD project. A poll was conducted to decide on a meeting time, and we eventually agreed on 8 pm. The meeting time came I logged into google meet expectant of my team members, I found myself soliloquising, where are my team members (Egbami ke). 8.10 pm still no one was joining. I had to change strategy, and decided to chat them up, some were in transit, and some had network issues. So had to postpone it till 8.30 pm. Then, the meeting started off with me and KBM, we were later joined by Rita (asst. team lead). Mary's network kept fluctuating (Naija happened to be her network) so she couldn't make any contribution. Laura had sought permission, but she would not be able to join us, which was granted. We discussed the PRD and got to know ourselves better, then we later postponed it.

Game of Thrones relived on Wednesday

Wednesday came with a wild streak, as we were swarmed with work. I had to first transcribe the minutes of the meeting, then I assigned everyone their tasks. We also scheduled a meeting with the PD teams for 6 pm, the meeting time notice was impromptu. So, the notice was sent in late. We did have our joint meeting, the meeting had in attendance, PD-team-6, PM team-8 and our team PM team-6. The joint meeting was an interesting one, where we had to share our work and work collaboratively amongst the 3 teams. The collaboration caused a mild confrontation between the PMs and PDs (It was a brief moment, where the age-old rivalry between PMs and PDs was about to be revived o!). "For me, it was just a funny scene likened to the Game of Thrones, where they wanted to determine who controls King's Landing and Westeros altogether". To cut a long story short, we were able to arrive at an amicable conclusion and a way to move forward. We all agreed to: form a group chat for the team leads and assistants to manage our discussions; to deliberate on a suitable name for the APP, as we had several name suggestions; to determine the particular feature to be featured on the APP, with guidance from the product design teams. We also decided to have another joint meeting, a date to be decided on before submission.

Hectic Thursday

Thursday started off very early for me, knowing there were several tasks that needed to be completed, 1. to collate and update the PRD real-time on Google Docs, 2. to decide on specific features to include, this was to be done between the two PM's team leads (this was a process of selection, assessment and elimination of each feature one after the other). After completing the feature selection or elimination process and proceeded to deliberate on the name for the App. I also use this opportunity to salute Rita my assistant team lead and the team lead of PM-8, she was very patient and supportive, as I kept probing her to explain some of her reasons for her decisions on each feature (I just wondered if I was the one, I go don cast). After agreeing on the new features, they had to be reassigned to the PMs, while I work on other areas of the PRD such as user personas. I had to stop at some point, save and go to sleep "when my eyes was just turning on its own".

FREAKY FRIDAY- Submission Day

By Friday, submission jitters had set in, while the panic mode was being activated. Updates and reviews were being done by my other PM colleagues. My assistant discovered that we haven't included user scenarios and user personas in the PRD yet. We had to quickly do that, she handled user scenarios, while I handled the user personas. Hopefully, all goes well and we submit it 4in due time. Writing this blog post alone is another major task on its own. Putting words together and making it an engaging read is hard (content writers una dey try o). This week's experience was a roller-coaster for me especially, till next week, I sign out for now.

You can access our #PRD for FOOD FIX document on this link.