Andelans are brilliant. We continuously have innovative ideas. Of course, we energize our passions by working on our ideas sometimes.
However, we need to make sure we are protecting the interests of our organization and our partners as well.
So we have a standard IP policy like most technology companies do. What’s different with Andela is that we give our employees 100% rights to their IP as long as they can prove to us that their IP does not conflict/compete with Andela’s or our partners.
You won’t be restricted from working on your ideas and products. Just act in the best interests of the company and you’ll be fine.
Our internal Learning operations are quite complex as we have to prepare our Developers for specific technologies that our Partners need.
To have a more predictable pipeline, we choose the technologies for our Developers when they first join. We do understand the importance of passion in learning, so we enable our Developers to “restack” to a different technology of their choice after working with at least one Partner.
In the future (a few years out from now), we hope to distribute more learning opportunities outside of Andela that cover a wide range of technologies so that every aspiring technologist can own their learning without having us choose their path for them.
You probably already know this. The way to learn product management is by building products as a product manager.
Chicken and egg problem? Not really. Here are some steps I recommend:
Find a role model. Identify a Product Leader in your network you can observe and learn from. If you do not have any, find one.
Read. A lot. Consume a lot of content about different product design + management practices and philosophies. This will provide you with a variety of mental models you can deploy when you start to build.
Build something. This is super critical. Ultimately, the only difference between product managers and non-product managers is that product managers manage products
I always see this “Build something” but no one gets specific…
Build what?
does this mean you have to be a developer before you become a program manager?
Thank you for your interest in the Andela Android Learning Community program supported by Google. The current phase of the program is still ongoing and will be concluded by July, 2017.
Follow our updates on Twitter @Andela_Nigeria to get notified on when the next phase will launch.
The issue with specifics is that it limits the potential of the learner.
Product Management is an art, and different Product Managers approach different products and engineering teams differently.
When I say “Build something”, I really mean to seek opportunities where one can realistically practice the principles and concepts that they have been studying, or observing from their role models/mentors.
Some realistic practice opportunities that I envision are:
Working on a product with friends: If you have developer friends building something, you could ask to play the role of Product Manager with them.
Join a startup in the ecosystem: We have many startups building interesting things in our local ecosystem. Most of them are lean so they typically would not have separate Product Management roles. You could reach out to these companies in our tech hubs e.g CcHub, iDEA Hub, Lead Space, etc. Offer to alleviate some of their responsibilities by being a Product Manager for them.
Start your own product: Find a problem you’re passionate about solving. Create a vision for a product that solves that problem. Find a team of developers to build it with you. Play the role of Product Manager.
Join Andela: Andelans can upskill into Product Management expertise from their third year. Some have managed to do it before that 3-year mark.
And for the part about being a developer first, you do not have to. However being a developer first would definitely help because you would be able to more readily gain the respect of developers and relate with them better. This blog post on Why you need to learn how to code as a Product Manager really breaks it down.
At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide how you want to get practical experience.
I am not sure about this because of lack of an avenue for experimenting my hypothesis. so here comes my hypothesis. It is possible to train machines to identify dangerous and harmless bots and lockout dangerous bots from the internet of things. Does Andela groom such characters?
It’s not entirely accurate to say that “Andela grooms such characters”. Since “grooming” may suggest a deliberate effort by the organization to methodically build such expertise.
Andela is filled with people who have incredible dreams and ideas like this one.
Even if we do not officially support Data Science, Machine Learning, AI, and IoT, in our core offerings, Andelans have created vibrant internal communities within our organization where people with these interests support each other through study groups, experimentation pods, and hackathons.
Yetty Sanni is an example of an Andelan that’s part of such communities at Andela. Read her reflections on her medium page here.
Whatever Andelans want to learn, they are driven enough to learn it. We own our own learning and believe that our sum is greater than our parts.
@nadayar
Why is what new Andelas earn kept kind of unspoken to the general public?
I believe it’s only fair that people know the range of the salaries (if the payments are based on salaries) new Andela fellows earn.
Don’t get me wrong, people shouldn’t go to Andela just because they pay you to learn or anything of that nature. I know the value of going to Andela isn’t in the money earned alone but primarily and most importantly, in the knowledge and experience gained and you don’t want people applying to Andela because the pay is good. Besides, those that came for the money will surely fail because money isn’t enough motivation to do software development in the long term, you need to really want it and if the pay is not so exciting, those who still apply would have proven one thing- they aren’t there for the quick buck.
I thought Andela was one of the best startups created in Nigeria until you guys received about $24m funds from the CZI. Personally, I felt that sends a mixed message about its future and a smart tech entrepreneur might not be willing to associate (at a director level) with a company that isn’t profit driven.
My question: Would Andela growth be driven by mission statement or potential profit opportunities? In future, will you be considered a mission organisation or for-profit? Would you consider a public offering lets say 10 years from now?
Note: I understand you are the learning director so I’ll accept any answer including an undisclosed response.
Andela deeply desires to transform the perception of technical talent globally. One of the ways we are doing that is through our goal of building 100,000 African technologists.
Anyone who wants to achieve a goal like ours has a few options on how they can do it:
Start a non-profit: This would involve having to continuously seek funds from benefactors forever. The continuous reliance on external funds may become distracting. And the day our benefactors stop providing the funds, all hopes and dreams die.
Start a school; charge tuition: The learners would pay to learn so there’s no need to rely heavily on benefactors. We have seen this model repeatedly. We know that the traditional school model does not prepare people for real life work. We might end up pushing out a bunch of graduates that are not ready to create real world impact. Chances for globally changing the perception of technical talent are low here.
Build a sustainable business by having learners do real work: In this model, learners are working with global technology companies, daily changing the perception of what technical talent looks like, and the revenue from their work is used to support the learning of future cohorts of learners.
Andela chose to run with option #3. Even if in the short term we have to rely on external funds to support our growth, we are building a business that will sustain itself in the longer term, while energizing our mission every day. And it definitely helps to have investors that are mission-aligned.
Yes, there’s nothing there to master and it’s bread and butter and that’s why people use seconds to learn them and know them in and out and use them to drink tea
