Nigerian Woman Designs Her Way Into Product Management

Abimbola Bajomo was drowning in emails when she had her breakthrough moment.

Working at a Lagos legal training organization in 2016, she watched law firms submit award entries through a chaotic process. Documents scattered across inboxes. Judges struggled to track submissions. Someone needed to fix it.

So Bajomo opened PowerPoint and designed a solution. She had no formal tech training, just frustration with inefficiency and a sociology degree from Redeemer's University. When she showed her prototype to colleagues, someone told her she was doing product management.

"I thought careers in tech were only for computer science graduates," she says. She was wrong.

Growing up surrounded by bankers, Bajomo had resisted following her family into finance. Her mother worked in banking operations. Her uncle and brother were bankers too. She wanted law, but when university admission fell through, she studied sociology instead.

After graduation, she joined ESQ Trainings Limited, managing their Nigerian Legal Awards program. That's where the manual submission process became her training ground. She researched product management online, took free courses when money was tight, and taught herself design tools when contractors missed deadlines.

By 2019, she had transformed from a learning specialist into a full product manager. She had also built ESQ's first digital submission platform and helped design their e-learning system.

Her real education in payments came at TrainQuarters in 2020. The e-learning platform needed to help creators sell courses internationally. Bajomo integrated payment systems including Paystack, Flutterwave, PayPal and Stripe, learning how money moves across borders and through encryption layers.

"It was mind-blowing," she says. "It was beautiful."

In 2022, she joined Gokada, Lagos's logistics company, deepening her expertise in payments technology. She had traveled from legal award submissions to international payment systems, powered by curiosity and a PowerPoint deck.

Why This Inspires

Bajomo's story challenges the myth that tech careers require computer science degrees or expensive bootcamps. She proved that solving real problems teaches more than any curriculum. Her path shows how operational frustrations can become career launchpads when you're willing to learn and build solutions yourself. In an industry obsessed with formal credentials, she built expertise one free online course at a time.

Today, Bajomo works in Nigeria's rapidly growing payments sector, an industry expected to process over $40 billion in transactions by 2025. The woman who once dreaded following her family into finance now helps shape how money moves across Africa, all because she couldn't stand a messy email inbox.