Florences Year in Review

Its the last day of the year and I look back at the multiple ups and downs, opportunities gained and opportunities lost, the lessons learned and everyone I met that helped shaped my journey, a whole lot happened this year that shaped me as a person and as a woman in tech. Everything just makes me thrilled and excited for next year!

Okayyy, lets take it back to the beginning of 2021 and just kind of run through the wins, lessons, opportunities and fav highlights!

First Quarter

This year began with so many uncertainties, I thought I knew what I wanted to get out of the year, I had planned to take on new programming languages, finish my program in school with an amazing grade, land an amazing job and connect with people far and wide. The school year started in Jan and with the lockdown, I had to take classes along with a training program in accordance with my course of study. Juggling school, the training program and freelancing as a web developer was really a lot to juggle but I was able to make it work until I ended the training program in March.

By February, my contract with a firm had ended as a web developer and I went back fully into freelancing and got most of my clients from recommendations! I explored technical writing, wrote my first article - https://dev.to/theflorz/how-to-make-wine-glasses-with-pure-html-css-328g, published it on dev.to and it was a hit!! The article got me the top 7 badge . That's not all, my second article - https://dev.to/theflorz/nevertheless-florence-coded-because-nothing-can-stop-her-4m81 was a hit also and yes I got a shecoded badge for participating in this year's shecoded #IWD . I also got to write product documentations for clients.

I discovered badminton and loved every bit of it

Second Quarter

Ah yes, more school, more learning and more freelancing. At this point, getting a job became scary because I felt like I wasn't good enough. What kind of brought me some sense of fulfilment was a project I got to work on with data analysts, we worked with PowerBI, MS excel to display interactive graphs, charts etc. I was able to work on more projects with the firm as a freelancer.

I worked on projects that strengthened my frontend skills and WordPress skills, I was starting to implement dynamic websites and UI/UX designs using WP from scratch, who could have thought ?

More badminton.

Third Quarter

Going into August, I started exploring and reading about Product/Project Management and oh did I fall in love with it. I had started talking to a few people about transitioning to Product Management and asking what that would look like, a friend and mentor Geektutor gave me a few pointers and it just made me love every aspect of PM more.

I started taking a course on project management on Alison, I wasn't even done with the course before I went around telling people to recommend me for any project management roles. I don't know where that confidence came from myself but learning and doing the tasks just made me feel like yes, this is my thing, yes this is me, I love leading teams, I love overseeing project, yes! I can do this, this is all me! And oh did I land my first gig as a Project Manager(I am forever grateful to Caleb for trusting me)!

This came with a few doubts and confusions, it was either product or project management, thankfully I had amazing people in my corner and I eventually decided to focus on product management. Oh the project manager role up there ? It got bumped up to product manager.

Got a project management certification and finished my program with a first class!! Whoop Whoop!

Fourth Quarter - The big wins!

I stepped into the last quarter of the year as a product manager working with an amazing team. Thankfully, I was able to put what I had learned to the test, I had to learn more on my own and I also learnt a lot working on the project. And I paid more attention to my body, started working out and eating healthy .

I also got a role as a web developer with Dira Labs and yes, I still freelanced lol. I landed my second PM role working as the PM on an in-house project.

My biggest win of the year really came at the end when I applied and got into the Women Techsters bootcamp organized by Tech4Dev an initiative aimed at empowering and introducing women to tech, I applied for the Product Management track and got in! The bootcamp was for 2 weeks, it was really fast paced with hands-on tasks and assignments that helps you master skills. For my track, I was appointed the class captain and as the captain, I created a documentation accessible to my other bootsters that explained how to submit assignments, how to access resources and materials, how to access class recordings, and the documentation also featured useful links.

The bootcamp introduced me to aspects of product management such as product roadmap, software development lifecycle, SDLC models, Agile model, Scrum framework, User research, MVP specification, user flow and persona, product/feature PRD, etc.

At the end of the bootcamp, we were divided into teams to come up with a product based on any of the United Nations SDGS. For my team, our product FeedAll a food donation app addressed the SDGS goal 2 - Zero hunger and yes, I was team lead haha. As team lead, I created a product brief, assigned tasks to my team members and also lead stand-ups to check in on tasks progress. As a team member, I was tasked with creating user flow, user persona, product mock-up/protype, MVP specs and compiling my team's PPTX.

I will my say PM roles gave me a head start facing these tasks, I was able to seamlessly work with some PM tools such as Miro to create user flow. Having worked with product designers, I was able to find my way around figma to create a high fidelity mock-up and a prototype for the product.

A picture of the Mock-up I made

I was paired with amazing ladies, Funmi, Bolu, Deborah, Audrey, Fredah, Grace, Bukunmi, Abisola and boy did they deliver on their respective tasks. My team's presentation was met with amazing feedbacks because of our collective efforts and awesome work rate. This article wouldn't be complete without not giving a shoutout to our amazing facilitator Theodora. I have made life long friends and mentor coming out of this bootcamp .

To wrap up the year, I got a certification in product management, I am still thriving as a web developer and also I got into a product management study group that starts Jan 6th, 2022.

Wrap Up - What next ?

Writing this article, I chose to focus more on my wins rather than my losses. Trust me when I say I had my fair share of imposter syndrome, depression, brokeness and self hate, I know what they took away from me and how I had to pick myself back up which is my takeaway of the year - Never give up! Keep going. You'll definitely find your niche and it'll find you too and you'll love each other genuinely. So thank you 2021 for the lessons, the opportunities, the win, the losses and the amazing people in my corner - Elizabeth, Hassan, Daniel, Oluwasayo, Sodiq and my Dira Labs family, Caleb, Yemisi, Aishah, Oyindamola, Rashidat, Janet, Deborah and Ebun, I love you guys so much . To an amazing 2022!