How Obiageli Okafor went from footwear entrepreneur to award-winning product manager

Growing up in Aba, a city in southeastern Nigeria, Obiageli Okafor’s ambitions were shaped by the examples around her. 

As a major trading and manufacturing hub, Aba offered her countless glimpses of entrepreneurship in action. Years later, those early influences would lead her to build a footwear company of her own in Lagos.

Four years ago, she moved to the United Kingdom, where a master’s degree in digital business management opened the door to a career in technology. Since then, she has held product management roles with companies across the UK and Dubai, building experience at the intersection of technology, business, and product.

Alongside her corporate career, she founded PMhelp, an edtech nonprofit created to help aspiring product professionals find their path into the industry. 

She has also recently written a book inspired by the question she is asked most often: “How did you achieve all this in such a short time?”

In this conversation, she talks about orchestrating her success with a five-year plan, learning to network and volunteer, starting afresh in a new country, and the benefits of visibility in her career.

If your career were a movie, what would it be called, and why?

Audacity. I’ve always said that if I ever write a memoir, that would probably be the title, because so much of my life and career has been defined by having the audacity to punch above my weight.

I have applied for roles I did not completely feel ready for. I have entered rooms where I was one of the youngest people there, one of the few women, sometimes the only African woman, and still believed I had something valuable to contribute. I have moved countries and rebuilt my career in a new market. 

I have also put myself forward for awards, speaking opportunities and leadership roles before I had any guarantee I would be chosen. Some of those decisions led to recognition like TechWomen100, one of Brummell’s 30 Rising Stars of London, one of She Inspires’ 100 Female Impact Leaders in the UK, and the first African woman to win the Women in Telecoms Champion Award.

To me, audacity is not arrogance. It’s being willing to ask, “Why not me?” before the world has necessarily permitted you to believe it.

Much of my career has come from doing things before I felt completely qualified, prepared, or certain of the outcome. Sometimes audacity looks like confidence. Sometimes it’s simply being scared and doing it anyway.

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What sparked your passion for building products?

Looking back, I think I had been doing product management long before I knew it was a profession.

I studied English and Literary Studies, wrote poetry and later built a footwear company called Eon Brands in Nigeria. We made thousands of shoes for hundreds of customers before I eventually exited the business.

Running that company meant constantly asking product questions. What do customers actually want? Why are they choosing one design over another? How much should we charge? What can we manufacture reliably? What do we stop making? How do we improve the experience?

When I entered technology, I found myself drawn to the same questions. What made product management exciting was that it sat at the intersection of so many things I already enjoyed: people, psychology, technology, business, storytelling and problem-solving.

My unconventional background became an advantage. Literature taught me how to understand people and communicate ideas. Entrepreneurship taught me commercial thinking and ownership. Technology gave me scale.

Product management brought all of those parts of me into one profession. It never felt like discovering something new. It felt like finally finding the name for the kind of work I had always enjoyed.

What differences have you noticed in how the job is done between Nigeria and abroad?

There’s no one way product management is practised in either market. Companies differ enormously.

What I have noticed is that product roles in more mature UK organisations often operate within much more established systems. There may already be dedicated teams for each function. The product manager’s challenge becomes alignment, prioritisation and decision-making across a complex organisation.

In many younger technology companies, including environments I experienced earlier in my career, product people are far more hands-on. You might be doing discovery in the morning, writing requirements in the afternoon, speaking to customers, testing something and thinking about go-to-market almost simultaneously.

Neither environment is necessarily better. The resource-constrained environment teaches resourcefulness and ownership. You learn to move quickly and figure things out. Larger organisations teach influence. You realise having the right answer isn’t enough. You need to bring engineering, commercial teams, operations, legal, leadership and sometimes several countries along with you.

Working across both has made me appreciate that great product management is ultimately contextual. It’s less about following a framework and more about understanding the problem, the organisation and the people you need to move with you.

How did you fast-track your career in just four years in the UK?

I became deliberate about increasing the size of the problems I could solve. Doing only what’s written in your job description is rarely enough if you want accelerated growth. I looked for messy problems, understood the business behind them and volunteered for work that stretched me.

I also became obsessed with learning. When I didn’t understand something, whether commercial models, data, APIs, AI or telecommunications, I learnt enough to have intelligent conversations with the people who did.

Then there was visibility. For a long time, I believed good work would simply speak for itself. It doesn’t always. I began documenting what I was learning, speaking publicly, contributing to communities and building relationships within the industry. That eventually led to recruiters approaching me, speaking opportunities and recognition for work I had already been doing.

Finally, I was willing to move when I had outgrown an environment. I don’t believe in jumping for the sake of jumping, but I also don’t believe loyalty should mean stagnation.

The combination was simple: become useful, keep learning, solve increasingly valuable problems and make sure the right people know what you can do.

Tell me about an event that shaped you professionally

Moving from Nigeria to the UK and rebuilding my career. When I arrived, I realised that previous success doesn’t always travel with you the way you expect. 

I had to learn a new market, rebuild my network, understand how people hired, communicated and worked, and prove myself again. There were moments when it felt like I had gone backwards.

That experience changed how I think about careers. I stopped seeing career growth as a straight line and started seeing it as a collection of skills, relationships, reputation and resilience that you carry with you.

That rebuilding period eventually led me to start PMhelp, a nonprofit to support people in their product journey, because I never wanted anyone to go through what I did when I came to the UK.

You wrote ‘Impossible to Ignore.’ What actionable steps can women take to be impossible to ignore?

The first thing I say in Impossible to Ignore is that visibility without value is just noise. The goal should never be to become known for the sake of being known. Become exceptionally useful first.

A few things women can do immediately:

First, decide what you want to be known for. If I mention your name in a room you’re not in, what three things should people associate with you? Build depth around those things.

Second, document your work. Keep a record of products shipped, problems solved, revenue influenced, awards won, speaking engagements, customers helped and lessons learnt. Your career becomes much easier to communicate when you have evidence.

Third, speak about what you know. That can mean posting on LinkedIn, speaking internally at work, writing articles, volunteering for panels or simply contributing intelligently in meetings. Visibility begins long before social media.

Fourth, build relationships before you need them. Some of the biggest opportunities in my career have come through people who knew my work before an opportunity existed.

Fifth, ask. Ask to lead the project. Ask for the introduction. Apply for the award. Pitch yourself for the panel. Put your name forward.

Women are often taught to wait until we feel completely ready. Careers rarely reward that.

My LinkedIn community grew from just over 2,000 people to more than 11,000, and that visibility helped recruiters find me, led to speaking invitations, industry recognition, and opportunities I could never have planned myself.

You said growing up in Nigeria, you didn’t consider becoming the first African woman to win a UK telecoms award possible. Why?

Because you cannot dream specifically about a world you have never seen. Growing up in Aba, I had ambitions. I wanted to do meaningful work and build a successful life. But becoming the first African woman to win a telecommunications industry award in the UK was too far outside the world I knew.

I didn’t grow up seeing many people whose careers looked like the one I eventually built. I studied English and Literary Studies. I wrote poetry. I was a cobbler. There was no obvious roadmap from there to becoming a senior product leader in technology in London.

That’s why representation matters to me beyond the cliché. When people see someone with a background that resembles theirs doing something unusual, the boundaries of what they consider possible begin to move.

Receiving that award made me think about the young woman I used to be. She did not lack ambition. She simply did not yet have the reference points.

That’s part of what drives my work through PMhelp, speaking, mentoring and everything else I do. Sometimes you don’t need to tell somebody exactly what to become. You simply need to show them their starting point doesn’t have to determine their destination.

Have you had any failures in your career?

Absolutely. Awards are highlights, not the full story. I have applied for opportunities I did not get. 

From 2023 to 2025, I interviewed for at least 200 jobs I was convinced were mine and was rejected. I have worked on ideas that did not perform the way I expected. I have walked into environments where I struggled before I found my footing.

Moving to the UK itself came with a period where my career didn’t look particularly impressive from the outside. 

I had already built businesses and worked in technology, yet I still had to prove myself again in a completely different market. There have also been professional decisions that, in hindsight, I would make differently.

What failure has taught me is not to turn individual outcomes into identity. One rejection can easily become, “Maybe I’m not good enough.” I try instead to ask, “What is this outcome teaching me?” 

Sometimes the answer is I need a new skill. Sometimes I need to communicate my value differently. Sometimes the opportunity simply wasn’t mine.

We make successful careers look too neat after the fact. Mine certainly hasn’t been. There have been wrong turns and disappointments. The difference is that I’ve become good at extracting lessons from failure and moving forward.