You’ve been on Instagram today. Maybe you’re even coming from there?

It’s okay. I read and write. I don’t judge. 

On your side of Instagram, if your algorithm is as cool as mine, have you come across those people with insane talents that make you wonder how they even found out they were capable of such things in the first place? The kind you see, rush to the comments section to be sure everyone else is as mesmerised as you are, and the first comment on the post says, “I’m sorry for breathing the same air as you.”

That’s what speaking to this Moniepoint PM felt like for me.

The product life of Princess

Princess is a Product Manager at Moniepoint GB. Based in the UK, she builds for Africans everywhere, blending structure and empathy into how she ships products, and if she were a product herself, perhaps an app, she’d be Meta. Not just one product but the full suite, with Instagram as her lead interface; a collection of updates, clean launches, sharp UIs, and always evolving. 

With Princess, before anything gets shipped, it usually starts with a note. Sometimes, the Notes app. Other times, an old-school spiral-bound pad. Either way, Princess ends her day with a list, not of tasks per se, but of patterns. Things that didn’t work. Conversations that got stuck. Bottlenecks she couldn’t shake. Somewhere between her Eisenhower grid and a late-night prayer, a plan begins to form. 

I, too, am a product of to-do lists and carefully curated playlists, so it makes sense that I speak with Princess to bring you an inside look at the planning, decisions, and strategies that go into developing products and processes at Moniepoint.

Finding product-market fit 

The story of Princess the PM didn’t start with a boot camp. It started with a suggestion: “You should be a PM.” That was 2019. In early 2020, she’d just wrapped research for a friend who noticed something in her, the kind of empathy that builds products people actually want to use.

At the time, she was a corporate strategist at an oil and gas company, helping steer business growth with a sharp eye and a strong sales instinct. Confidence wasn’t the question. She’s always had that. Her real edge was a quiet sense of responsibility; if I’m leaving something stable, I must be phenomenal at what I’m walking into.

So when the world slowed down, she found herself face-to-face with possibility. Her engineer’s brain liked the flow. Her friend’s words stayed with her, such that by the time she came across product management, it felt like coming home.

Defining product discovery

Three years later, Princess joined Moniepoint, building real products for real people. In discovery sessions today, Princess doesn’t just ask users about features. “I ask questions that unravel their behaviour, that allow me to see what and how they think, and their actions, rather than asking direct questions,” she tells me. That instinct, to listen beyond the surface, is what makes her not just a product manager but a pattern spotter.

Building in real-time and real-life

Princess is someone who lives on to-do lists, as I’ve established. Not just by preference, but by practice. Her time is a living document. Here’s what her workday might look like, based on how she actually operates:

10:00 p.m.
She plans her days the night before, sometimes the whole week, daily. Even chores get sub-tasks. Basically, a life designed like a product: iterated, intentional, and always shipping.

She uses the Eisenhower Matrix, a way of organising tasks by importance. First, she asks: Is this urgent? Is this important? If it’s both, she’ll do it right away. She sets a time for it if it’s important but not urgent. If it’s just admin or small tasks, she’ll batch them. If it’s not that useful right now? She puts it aside.

Even simple things like “clean the house” get split into mini-tasks: sweep the floors, wipe the counters, change the sheets. It helps her stay focused and feel accomplished.

6:00 a.m.
Wake up. Morning reset.
No Slack. No Jira. No noise. It’s a slow stretch into the day, with maybe a quick glance at her Notes app to review the night-before plan. If she’s editing a YouTube script or preparing a brief for her podcast, this is the quiet hour to think before the inbox floods.

7:00 a.m.
Carpe Diem.
Her phone and notebook are open. She’s reviewing what rolled over from yesterday, splitting complex tasks into manageable pieces. For example: “Finalise PRD” breaks into ‘get final comments from design,’ ‘align with backend team,’ ‘update Jira ticket.’ Anything that feels unclear or unprioritised gets pushed, flagged, or reframed.

8:00 a.m.
Check Slack messages. Respond. Log in to Jira.
She’s scanning Slack for updates, maybe an engineer in Nigeria has flagged an API issue, or someone in the UK asked for clarification on a ticket. Her job is to move information between people clearly. If there’s a blocker, she’s already tagging the right person to resolve it.

10:00 a.m.
Documentation & specs.
This is where the real build work starts.

She’s writing detailed product requirement documents, maybe for an upcoming Moniepoint product update. She’s clarifying expected outputs so engineering doesn’t need to guess. Designers need one level of detail, but the backend team needs more: field formats, edge cases, logic for when a user’s address fails verification, and fallback scenarios.

She’ll plug diagrams into Whimsical, reference older flows from Lucidchart, and, if necessary, dig into Slack archives to trace why a past decision was made. Once the document is stable, she links it to the Jira ticket and tags relevant teams.

12:15 p.m.
Stakeholder sync.
She hops on a call with internal teams, maybe compliance, risk, or treasury,  to review a request for change. Sometimes it's pressure from the business: “Can this launch two weeks earlier?” Other times it's feature creep: “Can we add X to this flow before launch?”

Princess is the translator in the room. Her job is to ask: “What problem are we trying to solve? What’s the trade-off? Who needs to know if this changes?” And when there’s tension, say, when engineering is at capacity, she doesn’t just escalate. She clarifies, resolves, and sometimes compromises.

This is where her communication edge shows. She’s not just moving fast; she’s moving with precision.

2:00 p.m.
Review issuer processor work / Visa licensing updates.
Princess flips into her Moniepoint GB hat here. There’s an ongoing stream of regulatory coordination with external providers, internal legal, and operations. Today, she might confirm that our issuer processor has completed an agreed-upon integration or update the team on a Visa documentation change. This part of the day involves a lot of nudging: “Hi, just checking if you’ve been able to confirm with X?” It’s part PM, part operations, part unflappable air traffic controller.

4:00 p.m.
Wrap documentation. Flag blockers. Share updates.
She finalises any Jira tickets open during the day, maybe an engineer pushed back on an acceptance criterion, or a designer raised a UX concern that now needs addressing. She adds comments, creates sub-tasks, and drops an end-of-day summary in Slack so nothing falls through.

Before she logs off, she notes what didn’t get done. It goes into tomorrow’s plan. Not as a lump, but broken down, re-sequenced, and re-prioritised.

6:00 p.m.
Time to build… outside work.
Maybe she’s editing a YouTube video on time-blocking or planning the following People in Products virtual hangout.

People in Products is an award-winning community where product professionals come to breathe, grow, and figure things out. Before she created People in Products, Princess was just like many other PMs, sharp, curious, and navigating a career that often felt like a maze with few signposts. 

The job can be oddly lonely. You’re responsible for momentum, but not always in control of the levers. You’re not the engineer, designer, or CEO,  but somehow, everything is your problem to solve. And so, she built a space for people like her.

Then there’s her YouTube channel.

YouTube is a digital notebook where she thinks aloud about time, energy, and getting things done. The videos are simple, well-structured, and unreasonably helpful. She shares the same tools she uses and how they’ve helped her make sense of the chaos. 

The thing about clarity is that once you find it, you want to give it away. That’s the part that really got me.

Not the tools or the titles, but how fully she shows up in every part of her life with that same mix of structure and empathy. Whether she’s speaking to merchants in Kano, onboarding a new engineer, or filming a video about overcoming burnout, there’s a rhythm to it. 

I stop for a moment and think: how is this even one person?

Delivering an MVP

As far back as she can remember, she’s always been this version of herself, structured, introspective, and ready with a plan. 

Princess thinks of her life the same way she thinks about her products, constantly in motion, always under review. She has a goal, a vision, and a life she wants. But the real work is in deciding the steps: how she’ll get there, when to pivot, what to let go of, and why it all matters. She wants a C-suite role someday. Maybe Chief Product Officer. Maybe COO. She's drawn to operations, rhythm, clarity, and well-oiled systems, and it's no surprise. She's been building the operating model of her own life for years.

If Princess were an MVP, she’d be a version designed with care, already delivering value, but still in open beta. Every version since has been smarter, sharper, and more defined, but never final, never finished.

And that’s the point.

I don’t think she’ll ever stop iterating.

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