Bright Okereke didn’t choose product management. A missing grade did. 

Bright Okereke didn’t plan to become a product manager. A missing biology exam changed everything. 

In 2013, Okereke, fresh out of secondary school, was hoping to study Electrical and Electronics (Computer) Engineering at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri (FUTO) in southeastern Nigeria’s Imo State. He had spent most of his teenage years obsessed with computers.

“I got access to computers as a kid; I was enrolled into a computer training centre immediately after my primary school,” he says. “I was able to pick up very quickly and during my secondary school days, I could type at over 100 words per minute.”

Computers fascinated him, and engineering felt like a natural path. But when admission season came, things did not go as planned.

Okereke, who grew up in Aba, the commercial city in southeastern Nigeria’s Abia State, failed to secure admission to study engineering. He had listed Agricultural Extension as a backup course. 

“I loved agriculture,” he recalls. “ My dad had a farm, and I used to join him.”

Then another problem surfaced.

A university staff member informed him that he could not switch into Agricultural Extension because he had not taken Biology in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), Nigeria’s university entrance exam.

Instead, she suggested something else: Project Management.

“I did [choose Project Management] because I didn’t even know what else to do then,” he admits.

At first, the course sounded random. Then curiosity kicked in.

Okereke began researching what project management actually meant. Somewhere in that search, he realised the field sat surprisingly close to technology, operations, and systems building.

“I found out [project management] was actually a very big thing,” he recalls. “It was also a tech career that I could pursue.”

That accidental pivot would quietly shape the rest of his career.

By the time he graduated from FUTO in 2018 with a degree in Project Management, he had already started teaching himself how software worked. Between 2016 and 2017, he spent late nights learning to code through platforms like W3Schools and Lynda.com.

But graduating into Nigeria’s job market was less inspiring.

Nigeria produces over 600,000 university graduates a year, many of whom struggle to find formal employment. Like many young Nigerians trying to stay afloat, Okereke took whatever work he could find.

For a while, he worked in a bakery mixing dough and baking bread, while waiting to participate in the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), Nigeria’s mandatory one-year program for graduates.

In 2020, he was posted to Atisbo Local Government Area in Oyo State, hundreds of kilometres away from home. He taught Mathematics at Baptist Secondary School during the week and spent weekends travelling to Ogun State to freelance for MaxOrg Homes and Properties, a real estate company, generating leads and managing prospective clients.

The role paid, but it drained him.

“It let me know that [marketing]  was not my calling, [and] that I needed to move into something else,” he says.

Reserved by nature, he found the constant social interaction exhausting. But the experience taught him something useful: communication mattered, even for quiet people.

After concluding his NYSC in 2021, his friend recommended him for a role at Clever Realty, a Lagos-based real estate company, as an executive assistant and project manager. 

He got the role. It was not yet tech, but the experience would help him in his future tech roles.

“I learned planning and executing goals across an organisation,” he says.

“As a reserved person, it trained me as well to be able to speak up to people,” he says. “Imagine following your boss to client meetings, and seeing the way he addresses the clients.”

The long road to the right role 

The transition into tech arrived properly in late 2021.

Okereke interned at Mentortribes, a remote startup that provides practical learning and internship opportunities for aspiring technology professionals. There, he worked with scrum teams and helped manage product development processes for software products, including a digital savings application inspired by ajo, the community-based rotating savings system common across Nigeria.

“My role was to manage the scrum team,” he says. “It served as a learning curve for me to practice agile product management within a SaaS team.”

For the first time, the theories he had studied started connecting to real products.

At the same time, he was taking online courses in product and project management through Coursera, building the foundation for what would become his career.

Then crypto arrived

In December 2021, while still interning at Mentortribes, Okereke joined Blocklo Technologies, a Nigerian blockchain and cryptocurrency company, initially writing articles about cryptocurrency and Web3.

“I was able to start picking up a bit of interest in crypto while still in school,” he says. “There was a lot of buzz around  Bitcoin [and] Ethereum.”

By then, crypto adoption in Nigeria was exploding. Bitcoin and Ethereum had become part of mainstream online conversation, particularly among young Nigerians looking for alternative financial systems. Nearly one in three Nigerians had used or owned crypto assets, making Nigeria a leading country for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption globally.

Okereke saw an opening inside the company.

“One day, I told my CEO that I also had project management experience,” he recalls. “We were looking for a project manager at the time.”

The CEO agreed.

In March 2022, he officially transitioned into product management, working on a crypto wallet and NFT marketplace.

The role deepened his understanding of how digital products are built under pressure: coordinating engineers, balancing timelines, handling stakeholder expectations, and shipping products across distributed teams working in different countries and time zones.

“Blocklo technologies helped me understand product development in the crypto and Web3 space,” he says. “I also understood how to collaborate across multiple time zones which helped me excel in further roles down the line”.

That operational depth became increasingly valuable.

In 2023, he joined Wazobia Technologies, a UK-based software development company that builds digital products and technology solutions for businesses, working remotely as a hybrid project and product manager until 2024. 

“My biggest lesson was learning how to manage distributed teams across different time zones while keeping projects on schedule,” he says. “I also strengthened my stakeholder management, Agile delivery, and product planning skills.”

He also worked on Hivedeck, a website builder for small and medium scale businesses.

In April 2024, he left Wazobia “to pursue larger project management opportunities.”

Three months later, he resumed as a technical project and product manager at Pandar, a Lagos-based fintech that helps users exchange digital assets to cash. He currently leads product development at the company, a role he has held since April 2026.

Through the lens of a product manager

Okereke is emphatic about what the role of a project manager actually demands, and equally emphatic about how misunderstood it is.

“The PM deals with virtually everyone on the team,” he says. “When the project is falling apart, the PM is held responsible. And when the project is going forward, other team members get the glory.”

He describes the product manager as the glue that holds a tech team together:  the person who converts management goals into actionable roadmaps, anticipates problems, and ensures that engineers and designers are not simply busy, but moving in the right direction. Without that connective tissue, he argues, even technically gifted teams can build the wrong things efficiently.

Product managers spend 52% of their time on unplanned, reactive tasks, leaving little room for the strategic work the role actually demands. The result, as Okereke describes it, is a role that is  overloaded.

“You don’t even necessarily need to be too technical to be a PM, but you need to always know how to ask why,” he says.

He says if he could summarise his philosophy about his career into one line, it would be: “it can be done, just find out how.”

Outside his full-time role, he is building TaskGen, an automation tool designed to reduce the repetitive administrative work product managers deal with daily, from generating user stories to automating project documentation.

He is also building Optivane Systems, an operational performance and automation consultancy. He hopes to grow it into a leading company. 

For someone who arrived in project management by accident, Okereke now speaks about systems and product thinking with unusual clarity.

If there is a single philosophy tying his career together, it is this: “It can be done,” he says, “just find out how.”