Built in the trenches. Written for the job.
TrenchBuilt publishes the Field Guide series by Olu Durojaiye: practical, illustrated guides for Product Owners, Business Analysts, IT Project Managers, and Program Managers.
Nobody handed me the map. So I built one.
I wasn't spoon-fed. Nobody walked me through how a change really gets to production, what to say when a senior stakeholder wants a date the team can't hit, or how to keep ten people moving in the same direction when none of them report to you. I was made to figure it out, in the meetings, on release nights, and in the incidents nobody planned for.
So I built myself from the trenches. Every hard lesson became a mental model, a checklist, or a script I kept in my head and reused the next time. Over the years that store of models became the way I work across product, program, and delivery roles, in industries that rarely look alike.
TrenchBuilt is that store, written down. It's for the people who were handed a role nobody fully explained. The Field Guides give you the models and tools I had to build on my own, so you spend less time guessing and more time doing good work.
Built in the trenches. Written for the job.
Built the products. Then wrote the guide.
Olu Durojaiye is a product and program leader. Over his career, he has worked with organizations including Microsoft, the Options Clearing Corporation, TD Bank, Cencora, Leidos, Edmentum, and Atmos Energy, across financial services, healthcare, education, energy, and technology.
Before relocating to the United States, he co-founded VoteGuard, an enterprise digital voting platform, and led it to a successful exit. He also co-founded the Caladium Lagos SME Bootcamp.
He is based in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas.
From the Field: a true story from the author's own work. Names, companies, and identifying details have been changed. Every "From the Field" box in the books follows this rule.
Learning that shows up in the books.
- MBA, Finance and StrategyMIVA Open University
- Product Strategy: Discovering, Developing, Managing and Marketing Products as a BusinessNorthwestern University, Kellogg School of Management
- BSc, Archaeology and GeographyUniversity of Ibadan
- UX/UI Design CertificateBloomTech
Certifications
- SAFe Product Owner / Product Manager (POPM)Scaled Agile, Inc.
- Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner (A-CSPO)Scrum Alliance
- Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)Scrum Alliance
- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)Scrum Alliance
- Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I)Scrum.org
- AI for Product OwnersScrum Alliance