Hello Thrivers,

For today’s THRIVE Influencer Spotlight, we are sharing the story of Elizabeth Ajao, a product manager whose career has taken her through payments, fintech, and financial technology, despite beginning with a university degree in Botany.

Over the last five years, Elizabeth has worked in product roles across companies including Sterling Bank, Polaris Bank, Remita, Quidax and other technology businesses, before moving into a global technology environment in the United Kingdom. Alongside her professional career, she also created Builders in Fintech, a community built around one simple problem she experienced firsthand: too much valuable industry knowledge was sitting in silos.

For anyone currently questioning whether they studied the wrong course, entered the wrong industry, or are too far behind to change direction, Elizabeth’s journey offers a different perspective.

Let’s hear from Elizabeth.

Botany was never really part of my original plan.

I initially wanted to study Pharmacy, but even Pharmacy was not necessarily something I had personally chosen. It was more of that familiar parental influence where you are considered a good science student, so the natural expectation is that you should study Medicine or Pharmacy.

I followed that path, but I did not get Pharmacy and eventually studied Botany instead.

By my second year, I had already started asking myself what I genuinely wanted to do with my life because I knew I was unlikely to build a career around Botany.

I had several interests. I liked media and anything that required me to think, investigate, or understand something deeply, but I was already studying Botany, and I was not going to start another undergraduate degree in Law or Media.

So I began looking closely at the interests that were still available to me.

Finance stood out.

My mother has a brick-and-mortar store, and when I worked with her, I often helped with bookkeeping and other parts of the business. I did not have formal financial training, but I realised that I genuinely enjoyed that side of things.

The good thing about finance was that I could pursue professional qualifications without going back to university for another degree.

I joined a finance club at school because I wanted more exposure to the industry, started preparing for professional examinations, and applied for several internships at financial institutions.

I did not get most of those internships.

But by the time I graduated, I had already decided that I wanted to pursue a career in finance, and during my final semester I eventually got an internship with Sterling Bank in the corporate finance division.

That became an important starting point.

From there, my career gradually moved towards product management, particularly products connected to payments and financial technology.

Definitely.

Even now, there are situations where I sometimes look at the work I am doing and think, “What am I really doing here?”

I currently work in a large technology environment in the United Kingdom, and there are still moments where that feeling appears.

But I have changed the way I respond to it.

Whenever I feel like I am not good enough or I do not understand enough, I take it as a signal that there is probably something I need to learn.

Product management today is not exactly what product management was three years ago.

AI has removed a lot of the abstraction that previously existed around certain tasks.

Some things used to take product managers several hours that AI can now help complete much faster, including documentation and other parts of the workflow.

That means people entering product management need to think carefully about the skills that are harder to automate.

One of the biggest is customer empathy.

AI can produce ideas, but the difference between a solution I create and one generated without enough context is that I should understand my customer more deeply.

The second important skill is problem framing.

There are always many problems a company could solve, but the real skill is deciding which problem deserves attention now and which one creates the most value.

That requires critical thinking and context.

You also need AI literacy.

Companies are beginning to reward people who understand a specific industry deeply.

If I apply for a product role at a fintech company, the advantage I bring may not simply be that I know how to write product documentation or follow standard product-management processes.

It may be that I understand payments. I understand how the industry works, the context around the customer, and some of the problems the company is likely to encounter.

When I entered fintech, one of the biggest frustrations I experienced was that information was often sitting in silos.

There were things I wanted to understand but could not easily find the knowledge or the people who could explain them.

That was the foundation of Builders in Fintech.

The goal is to circulate finance knowledge within the ecosystem.

The community is not completely open access. People fill out a form before joining because we want to understand why they are interested and whether the community is actually relevant to them.

That is important because Builders in Fintech is not supposed to revolve around one person. The point is that everyone working within the ecosystem should be able to help someone else understand something better.

“The idea is that the knowledge comes from people in the industry and stays with people in the industry.”

That is the kind of community I want to build.

I moved to a new country, I am completing my master’s degree in Innovation and IT Management, and I am also doing an internship that forms part of the final stage of that degree.

So when people ask me what comes next, the truth is that I do not have a perfectly defined answer yet.

There are points in life where everything is clear and there are other moments where you are still defining the next version of yourself.

This happens to be one of those moments for me.

So for now, fingers crossed.

I have a few ideas about how I would like to spend my time after school and after my internship, but I am allowing myself the space to figure out which direction makes the most sense.

Elizabeth’s journey is a reminder that careers do not always unfold in a straight line, and sometimes the skills, confidence and direction we need are built while we are still figuring things out.

From Botany to fintech, product management and now Builders in Fintech, she has continued to learn, adapt and make room for others to learn alongside her.

For anyone considering a career shift, her story leaves one useful lesson: you do not need to have the entire path mapped out before you begin. Sometimes, you simply need to take the next step seriously.

You can keep up with Elizabeth’s journey on Instagram, and learn more about the community she is building through Builders in Fintech.

Till next time,

Team Thrive

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