The First Step to Folding Paper
The art of Origami starts with a flat, plain piece of paper and slowly it evolves and takes shape just like you imagined it to from the beginning.
The Start
Hello there,
My name is Godson Njoku and I am a product manager. I started this career path in 2020 after years of being a community manager (or contractor sort of) and trying my hands at web development and design, to cut the chase you can read more about my origin story here.
So after months of learning and experimenting on stuff, I decided to start a side project to help showcase my product OPs (Operations - Design and Management) knowledge by sharing my product requirement documents (PRDs) for various ideas and concepts I came up with.
I think this will be helpful to budding developers and designers especially newbies who just completed their learning exercises and are trying to find ideas of projects they could work on, focusing on the how rather than having to figure out the what, but that's the half of it.
Also with the new year in full swing, this goal has slightly grown to include writing my design process for a couple of fictional UI design projects heavily inspired by the daily UI challenge and fascinating stuff I learnt about on the internet.
As it is typical of every human being, there is always a selfish reason for doing anything regardless of the intent either good or bad.
I will be upfront with mine as a person who loves full disclosure and share my selfish reason. I always wanted to be a builder and get things moving from text on my code editor to actual stuff that solves problems even though that didn't pan out as I wanted, I am still on a path that lets me do so.
And by creating this project, I get to live the lives of hundreds of builders and creatives when their projects ‘go live’ and they share it with the world, that means a lot to me.
Moving on...
Here are a few gotchas (a few things to keep in mind);
- The projects that you build or design belong to you and you decide what to do with it. You are free to give me credit if you wish.
- Most projects here are stuff I wish I could use at some point. They are often not platform or stack specific, but I expect you to do your own homework and see how far you can go with your current tooling and skillset. Learning by doing is probably the key phrase here.
- You are free to work in a team, collaboration helps you grow better as an individual in tech. You don't have to work on it in its entirety. You can work on a piece of it and find others within your community to work with you. A good example is a back end developer building the logic layer for an app and looking for a front end developer and designer to create a beautiful UI to go along with it.
- The user personas will mostly be fictional but I will be specific if I did a user survey for UX purposes. You can also subscribe to my substack publications to stay notified and help answer user surveys to help me going forward. Thanks a ton, :).
You are free to remix or switch up as you see fit. The PRDs are not written in stone, be creative with your approach
- I am open to having conversations about the work you have done and sharing useful pointers to help you become better. You can shoot me an email - officialnjokz@gmail.com or send me a DM on Twitter - @Sage_Godspeed.
And, we have liftoff!
With all that being said, I hope you have fun while working on your projects and learning along the way. Don't forget to ask folks in the community when you are stuck and have done your homework and still can find a way out. Big shout out to every collaborator who gave a helping hand at any step of this project
Exciting times ahead. May the odds forever be in your favour.
Go Legend.