Learning Product by Doing

When the ESQ Nigerian Legal Awards came around each year, the process was messy. Law firms emailed long submissions. Organisers sorted documents into folders, judges reviewed them, and someone had to keep track of who had sent what and what still needed attention. It worked, but only just. Watching the process unfold, Abimbola Bajomo thought there had to be a better way. Instead of accepting the system as it was, she opened PowerPoint and mapped out how a digital submission platform could work. There was no coding involved. The goal was simply to make the process easier to manage. Only later did someone tell her she had been doing product management.

Growing up around banking

At the time, Bajomo had never considered a career in technology. Banking, however, was familiar territory. Her mother worked in banking operations. An uncle was a banker, and her brother later followed the same path. Conversations about customers, transactions and financial services were common at home, but she never imagined herself working in the industry. Law was the career she wanted. Missing out on admission to the University of Lagos changed those plans, and she enrolled at Redeemer’s University to study Sociology instead. “I didn’t really know what sociology was about,” she says. “I just picked it because it felt close to law.” After graduating in 2015, she completed her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) at the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), where she worked on research into Nigeria’s school feeding programme. Research demanded patience.

Drafts regularly came back with requests for stronger evidence, more detail or another round of analysis. “You would write something, and they would tell you to go back because you hadn’t gone deep enough,” she says. That experience stayed with her. Paying attention to details became part of how she approached her work. During the same period, her mother encouraged her to apply for banking jobs. Although she sat recruitment tests for several banks, Bajomo accepted an offer from ESQ Trainings Limited, where she joined as a Learning and Development Specialist.

Learning by solving problems

ESQ organised professional programmes for lawyers and managed the ESQ Nigerian Legal Awards. Although her role had nothing to do with technology, she kept asking how everyday processes could work better. The awards became the first opportunity to test those ideas. Curiosity pushed her to learn more after sketching the submission platform. Free online courses, virtual workshops and hours of reading helped her understand what product management actually involved. Most of that learning happened outside working hours. Whenever a problem appeared, she looked for a practical solution. One example came when marketing campaigns were delayed because designers were unavailable. Rather than wait, Bajomo taught herself Canva and produced the materials herself. Later, as the company expanded its digital learning programmes, she helped design its e-learning platform. None of that work came with a product manager title. Instead, the responsibilities grew gradually. By the time she left ESQ in 2019, she had already spent several years improving internal processes, designing digital products and working alongside developers. The title simply caught up with the work.