It’s time to wrap up the year with a BANG! Introducing our extraordinary guest on the Founders’ Corner, a true embodiment of Passion! This founder redefines what it means to chase your dreams and turn them into reality.
We had the privilege of sitting with Joel Anaman, a passionate young man who is on a mission to change the world through his innovative ideas and relentless determination. His story is nothing short of inspiring and we can’t wait to share it with you!
Joel Anaman is the Founder of Mande and Career Wheel. He is also a trained Pharmacist by profession and he currently works as a Product Manager for mParma. Joel has always had a passion for helping people succeed.
Introduction and Background
- Can you share a bit about your background and journey in the technology and health industries that led you to found your startups (Mande and Career Wheel) and become a Product Manager at mPharma?
Before I started my first job, I did a six-month internship and I worked with this mentor and during this internship duration, I developed a passion for helping people with their resumé and coaching them on how to land jobs. Initially, I did these for free but when I realised that people placed little value on it , I decided to start charging a fee. That is how Productivity Optimizer, now Career Wheel, was birthed. Because I had been very active on X (formerly Twitter) posting career tips, I was able to grow my X following and this made publicity for Career Wheel easier. My experiences at Career Wheel birthed Mande and also fostered my transition into Product Management as a career path. I will share more information as the convo moves along.
- What motivated you to pursue a career that intersects technology and healthcare?
I worked as a Commercial Pharmacist (Sales) but I got tired of it and I really wanted to transition into the tech industry. I made this decision based on my personal values of autonomy, flexibility and being able to build a career that has no geographical limitations. So I secured the Chevening Scholarship which took me to the United Kingdom (UK) to study Business Analytics and Management Sciences at the University of Southampton. This was my opportunity to transition into tech. Initially, I wanted to get into Data Science but it turned out to be too technical. I later discovered Product Management in the software industry was a better fit for me since it would give me the opportunity to engage people like I did with sales, but this time, building cool stuff.
Alongside, I was building Career Wheel. After years of career coaching, I wanted to see what it would be like on the other end of a job search so I secured a contract role as a Recruiter at Wave Mobile Money and it was an interesting learning experience. 2 days short of a year later, I started a new role as a Senior Product Manager with mPharma where I could blend my product management knowledge with my domain expertise in healthcare.
Mande
The Vision behind Mande
- What inspired the creation of Mande and Career Wheel, and what is its core vision and mission?
Mande (pronounced Mandi) was created in order to help people document their progress and achievements throughout their lifetime. After years of coaching professionals and students, I discovered a trend that these professionals encounter some milestones as they progress through their careers but hardly take time to document these milestones and track the impact associated with it.
This heavily influences how they appreciate their personal value. If you are less aware of the value you have delivered to others within or outside your professional context, you may lack the confidence to position yourself for opportunities. You will be fully qualified for a job or scholarship yet be convinced that you don’t have what it takes to seize it.
Another existing issue is that currently, landing a job requires people to put themselves out there—be on LinkedIn, have a very good resume and all of that. However, competent people who do not put themselves out there do not get discovered because recruiters always go for the lowest hanging fruits—they have time bound headcount targets to meet. This leaves a huge gap in the talent marketplace.
So Mande comes in as an AI-powered career journal that helps you to document key activities across formal and informal work, whether paid or unpaid, monitor and evaluate your career and stay conscious of your growth. We believe that every experience counts and as dynamic as we are as humans, we easily forget about all these experiences that go uncaptured. What’s more? Mande leverages AI to help you learn more about your work by giving you weekly insights into your skills and providing you with the context within which you applied those skills. You can also give your boss better visibility over your work by generating weekly work summaries and sharing with them.
In the future, this is what Mande will look like for job hunting and recruitment. For job hunting, you set a goal for career progression with or without Mande’s assistance. You find a job in line with a job title Mande recommends to you based on all that you have been logging, then Mande uses all the information you have been logging to compile a resume for you with a complementary cover letter. Additionally, Mande generates likely interview questions and personalized answers based on the job specifications and the information you have been logging. No need to tailor resumes anymore. That’s peak efficiency.
For recruitments, here is what we envision: Through integration into major recruitment platforms, recruiters can have access to your experiences on permission as part of their recruitment processes, so you can have jobs apply to you. It’s that simple.
Career Wheel
Career Wheel is a service based business where you get to interact with coaches who assist you with the entire career and job search process. Mande goes in depth by leveraging AI to help you document your daily tasks, build awareness about your competencies and seize control over your career.
At Career Wheel, we have delivered 1-on-1 coaching to 400+ people globally, ranging from professionals, freelancers, entrepreneurs and students.
- Could you share some insights into the engineering, design, and marketing efforts that went into launching the landing page with 500+ organic signups in a month?
The whole process was very organic. We started by creating a Jotform prototype of Mande and shared it out there to find out how many people would be interested. About 40 people showed interest and that was positive feedback for us. So, we decided to create a landing page for Mande even before we started building it. Because of my Career Advocacy activities on X, I had a good number of followers so I publicised on there and on LinkedIn. My team also put the information across their socials and that got us 500+ signups in our first month.
Career Coaching and Impact:
- Your role as a career coach has reportedly generated more than $1m as income for African talents in Tech and Human Resource (HR). Could you elaborate on how you got involved in career coaching and some notable success stories?
Before I entered the tech space, in 2018, I managed to coach a very good friend into a marketing role in Big Pharma. Later in 2019, my friend joined me to coach another person into landing a job. This brought me a lot of fulfilment. In 2021, I ventured into the tech space and for the first time, successfully coached a client into getting a 6-figure dollar salary in Ghana! This was reassuring because although I had never written a tech resume, the resume writing frameworks we had built at Career Wheel just worked. Guiding professionals to earn good salaries to cater for their needs and that of their family’s felt good so I built a service-based product and scaled it up. Since then, we have secured $1.4 million in total base salaries for the professionals we have served.
- What do you think are the key factors that contribute to the success of African talents in the tech and HR industries?
Everything starts with self-awareness. Once you are self-aware, you are easily able to detect your strengths and weaknesses and work on them to become better. Self-awareness starts at documenting your wins, milestones, tasks, feedback, setbacks, learning and decisions across both formal and informal settings, whether paid or not. We tend to overlook a lot of value we deliver to others when self-awareness is out of the picture. Being aware of yourself makes it easier to engineer success. Furthermore, building the rare trait of curiosity propels you to find information faster. In my experience, a lot of people miss out on opportunities because of lack of access to information. So staying curious does the trick. Finally, you can feed off the curiosity to discover the soft skills as well as hard skills needed to become a Topnotch professional in your domain.
Product Management at mPharma:
- As a Senior Product Manager at mPharma, how do you approach developing products to meet the logistics needs of the health industry in Africa?
mPharma is located in several markets across Africa. Within my scope of work, partner pharmacies place orders to our warehouses and we have streamlined processes to get these products delivered on time. Working with pharmaceuticals is challenging because these are time sensitive products and you need to take into consideration the expiry dates, how soon they are needed and ensure that whatever is coming from the warehouse is going into the pharmacy’s inventory accurately. My role as senior product manager involves working with engineering, design and data teams to build our suite of logistics solutions: Bloom Marketplace where ordering happens and Last Mile Delivery App, which facilitates our deliveries. By having visibility across the supply chain, we are able to optimize inventory levels between the warehouse and retail facilities to drive profitability.
Challenges and Learning Experiences:
- In your journey as a Founder and Product Manager, what have been some of the most significant challenges you’ve faced, and what did you learn from overcoming them?
When I started Productivity Optimizer(now Career Wheel), I thought I just had to get people who are good at resume writing to join the team. However, a few months later, they were not performing as expected, so I had to let them go and restrategize. This was due to a mistake on my part. I had to define the culture I wanted to build for Career Wheel and ensure that the new team was aligned with that culture. That was one of my biggest lessons-assembling a team without considering the culture of the organisation.
For Mande, everybody on the team does fractional hours. We dedicate our time to our main jobs and spend time on Mande during weekends or holidays. It’s a very unusual way of running companies or building products in this region. This sometimes slows us down because we are not all available at the same time. Since we are building a lifestyle business, I have learnt to be patient and also think about the long-term.
Apart from speed, we have not faced any peculiar challenges when it comes to finances because we are bootstrapping. We are not open to investors just yet. We would like to get to a point where we are profitable, then maybe we can consider that. However, we are open to a lot of partnerships to drive our mission forward.
- As both a Founder and a Product Manager, how do you balance your time and priorities to ensure success in both roles?
I make use of to-do lists to help me keep track of the tasks I’m supposed to work on; it’s mostly a lot and quite difficult to keep everything in my head. I am my own accountability partner, and this is something that working in Sales for over 3 years taught me. Currently, the competent team and systems I built at Career Wheel gives me room to focus on other priorities. I deliver my 100%+ at mPharma as my primary obligation where I get to build solid B2B logistics products with amazing teams. I mostly schedule work on Mande for the weekend and holidays. So essentially, I make time to deliver in the various roles I find myself. It’s all about ruthless prioritization to understand what comes first, what has to be taken out, what comes last and so on.
- Can you share any specific strategies or principles you adhere to when building and leading a successful team?
I shared the failure I encountered early on, building the Career Wheel team for the first time. To build a successful team, you need to define the culture of your organisation and live the culture. For example, if you subscribe to a culture of transparency, you have to be transparent with your team. You should also be able to show your team a lot of respect and get them to outlive their potential. One way of doing this is being able to understand the developmental needs of your team and making sure that you align their needs with the needs of the organization. By having their needs met, they get to enjoy what they do and stay motivated on the job giving their 100% to the team.
Tech in Africa & Future Outlook:
- Are there specific trends or innovations in the African tech scene that you find particularly exciting or promising?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently taking over and it’s quite intriguing but I have seen very few organisations in Africa incorporating AI into their products. Organisations and Indie hackers outside Africa are making a lot of progress and money because they have incorporated AI in their offerings. I think this is an exciting trend and I wish a lot of startups in Africa will hop on this trend, obviously depending on the needs and offering of the startup.
I am confident that we will become trendsetters in incorporating AI into human capital and personal development solutions.
- What are your future plans for Mande, and how do you see the health tech landscape evolving in Africa in the coming years?
Healthcare access goes beyond selling medicines. The healthtech space should get to a point where we can get easy access to every aspect of healthcare—medicine, diagnostics, physician care. Yes, availability of telemedicine is vital but what about those who do not have access to these tech gadgets or internet? mPharma is breaking these access barriers by installing a tablet in every pharmacy that offers Mutti Doctor Service. That way, a patient does not need a smartphone to access quality healthcare at an affordable price.
There are some products that leverage chatbots to deliver medical assistance. However, the stakes are high when it comes to healthcare, because human lives are involved. This means we can’t entirely leave the delivery of healthcare in the hands of newer technologies like AI. There needs to be a deliberate effort by healthcare experts and organizations to ensure that these AI systems run as intended.
Closing Thoughts:
- Any events or plans we should look out for?
One of our core targets is that by 2030 we hope to reach 100 million people on the African continent. So we envision making Mande available to people right from the university so they can capture all their experiences and ride on that to build successful careers.
Career Wheel recently organised an intimate resume writing and job hunting masterclass for 16 professionals and the feedback was nothing short of amazing. In January 2024, we are planning to organise another one so if you are reading this, and you’re interested, you can drop us an email: getstarted@mycareerwheel.com. If any organisation would love to help their staff adopt a results-driven mindset at work, they can reach out to us.
- Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers, whether it’s advice for aspiring entrepreneurs or insights into HR and tech in Africa?
Whether you are a professional, freelancer, student or entrepreneur, just document everything across your formal and informal experiences- your daily tasks, wins, milestones, setbacks, feedback, decisions, learnings and all of those things. This will help you keep track of your growth and make you aware of your capabilities and value. And you can do this whether you have Mande or not.
Also our waitlist is still very active and we roll out invites every two weeks. Visit https://mande.mycareerwheel.com to join the waitlist and get early access to everything Mande.
Thank you, Joel Anaman, for joining us and making time despite your busy schedule. We had an incredible conversation that left us inspired and energised!
Your insights, ideas, and enthusiasm were truly amazing! We can’t wait to see all the incredible things you have in store for the future.
For more information, visit:
Mande waitlist: https://mande.mycareerwheel.com/
Career Wheel website: https://mycareerwheel.com/our-solutions/
You can also reach out via the social media platforms:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mycareerwheel
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mycareerwheel/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/themandeapp/
https://instagram.com/mycareerwheel
https://instagram.com/themandeapp
