Ronke Majekodunmi at Chief Product Officer Summit New York

Speaker: Ronke Majekodunmi, Director of Product , Promevo

Ronke Majekodunmi: Hi, everyone. My name is Ronke Majekodunmi, Director of Product of Promevo. For most of my career, I've worked in fintech. I've helped to build B2B products, B2C products and B2D products. I've been a product manager for over 10 years. And what I love about being a product manager is I get to build people and I get to build products. And if you build people well, then you're going to build great products and you will make your customers happy and build products that will change your customer's life for the better and society as a whole. Hopefully. And what I also love about being a product manager is I have the capability and the ability to lead with empathy, gratitude, humility. And I get to create a culture of intellectual fortitude, which is the only way that we're gonna innovate so that we can continue to build products, not just for today, but products for tomorrow that our customers haven't even told us they need yet. And I thank you all and I look forward to seeing you all next week.

Ronke Majekodunmi: I look forward to discussing purpose driven leadership at the C P O summit and highlighting the importance of not only aligning our goals and objectives with our organizations, but the importance of having a product vision, product strategy, but communicating that vision and strategy through storytelling and using that to galvanize the whole entire organization, regardless of where you are, whether you are in technical support, relationship management, you should be able to tell the story of how your organization builds tools to help your customers solve problems for their customers if it's a B2B, but to become heroes, right? How we make our customers heroes? And that story is so important because if it filters through the whole entire organization, then we're all not only innovating for our customers, but we're all speaking the same language and we're all walking the same walk, which I think is very important in product management. So I look forward to discussing purpose driven leadership, everybody.

Ronke Majekodunmi: So what do I think are the top three priorities for chief product officers right now? I think coming out of the pandemic, there are three that come to my mind. One is the North Star, the product vision, ensuring that there is one, it is going to change dependent because of market conditions changes. But I think it's important that the organization have a product vision to rally around, right? Or North Star. This is where we want to be three years from now. This is where we want to be two years from now. We know it's subject to change, but we at least have a plan that aligns with our core values. and aligns with what the market condition, at least right now, it looks like. The second is talent. When I say talent. so there's a culture change. As there's more than eight billion people in the world, we are all diverse, were more diverse than ever before. So to build products for an ever changing diverse culture, diverse people, we need diverse people in our organization that look like our customers, they walk like our customers, they talk like our customers. I'm talking about diverse product managers, diverse, cross functional partners that come from all walks of life. They have diverse backgrounds, diverse circumstances, diverse lived experiences and they are diverse in gender, they're diverse in thought. And this is important because we need those perspectives. If we're gonna build for diverse a diverse community globally, right? They are not those diverse customers are not gonna come to us, right? We have to go to them to understand their needs and understand the needs that they're not even communicating today, that they need. So therefore to do that, we need people in our organization that come from different backgrounds, different walks of life. And I think as a chief product officer, we have an incredible responsibility of making sure that we have an organization that looks like our customers because that's the only way we're gonna know how to serve them, right? And bring uh innovative ideas to the table, bring different thoughts to the table which we need in order to grow, to continue to grow and serve diverse communities. The last is growth. I think we, one thing that's come out of the pandemic is we must digitize pretty much everything, right? Everything from I can do everything on my phone, right? From ordering groceries, to ordering food and so forth, but that has to continue and to serve every community. We need people in our organization that have innovative ideas which means the most come from diverse environment once again. So having diverse candidate talent is important to not only execute on that product vision that North Star but also to bring about growth as well to figure out the needs of an ever changing diverse demographic. So those are the three things that I think are important right now, product vision, diverse organization, diverse talent, and of course growth and all of them are all intertwined together.

Ronke Majekodunmi: I am looking forward to the CPO summit because I get to learn from other chief product officers that have been in this role for quite a while and I get to meet some incredible new people and I get to present as well. So I am looking forward to the exchange of ideas and walking away with some networking. So I look forward, I can't wait until next week.