Peter Jegede: Stay curious and get comfortable with ambiguity

“Stay curious and get comfortable with ambiguity“

Peter Jegede shares about the daily life and challenges while building Ventures, how to stay curious, and what the business might look like in 3 years.

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What are you doing at Stryber?

I work with the venture founding team taking the role of the CPO. In a nutshell, I’m responsible for discovery and delivery: discovery – set the product’s vision and strategy; delivery – translate the strategy into planned work including deliverables and implementation timeline. Additionally, I also mentor a few product managers.

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What are you passionate about in your current role?

The creativity required in building a new venture. Every venture is unique and comes with its set of challenges, understanding the complex customer problems and building the right solution is thrilling.

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What are the 3 most relevant skills you need for success in this role?

1. Empathy: for the customer – truly understanding the customers’ underlying needs & motivations; for the stakeholders – weighing the opinions of various stakeholders and forging compromises between them to champion a clear and effective path forward for the product.
2. Curiosity: genuinely embracing a learning mindset – industry trend, customer needs, new technologies and many more; getting one’s hands dirty building stuff; drawing insights from data.
3. Self-organization: everyday there’s a never ending list of countless tasks, hence the need to be extremely organised with project management, time management, stakeholder management, prioritization and ownership.

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And what are some of the biggest challenges?

Building a venture requires getting comfortable with being accountable for things largely out of one’s control and dealing with constraints imposed by budget, legal or technology.

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Which project you have worked on that was the biggest success?

Worked on multiple projects and ventures at Stryber, it’s hard to classify one of them as the biggest success. Projects that fail do also generate a huge trove of learnings, that in itself is a success.

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Where do you educate yourself to stay up to date in your field?

I read books, follow industry thought leaders and talk to other product managers. I also listen to a ton of podcasts in different categories:

• Tech/Business (Decoder with Nilay Patel, Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman, E2: Entrepreneurs Exposed, Freakonomics Radio, a16z Podcast, Exchanges at Goldman Sachs, Land of the Giants, Trail Blazers with Walter Isaacson)
• Product (alphalist.CTO, Product Love, This is Product Management, Masters of Product Management, How I Built this with Guy Raz, The Everyday Innovator)
• Design (99% Invisible, Design Details, Design Life, Layout, Revision Path)
• Data (Data Skeptic; Data Stories)

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What do you think your business will look like in 3 years?

Good product management provides a sustainable competitive advantage. As this is becoming more widely understood, I see organisations adopting a product-driven culture in various levels of discipline including marketing, sales and so on.

Lastly, I’m a big proponent of the #NoCode and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) movement. While it is unlikely that no-code will completely replace traditional app development, the tools are getting more sophisticated, further lowering the barriers to entry and playing a significant role in democratization of app development.