Director of Product

Our client; a top business platform that equips small business owners across Africa is looking to hire a director of product in Cape town South Africa.

Your role at the company will be to take the lead on defining the future of our Products discovering and delivering experiences that will not only delight our SME and financial institution customers but truly help them overcome the obstacles they have in running their businesses.

This is a hands-on role where you will have the chance to both drive the Product strategy and be a part of the product development process. We are looking for someone who is eager to take ownership on game-changing initiatives while elevating the team around them.

Job Responsibilities:

• Set the product strategy of the company through a deep understanding of customer needs, industry trends, emerging opportunities, and the company’s business priorities.
• Be a thought partner to the CEO. Translate business goals into product strategy.
• Stay on top of the competitive landscape with a focus on maintaining the company as the product that delivers the most value to small businesses and banks.
• Ensure that there is alignment on product strategy across teams.
• Own the product roadmap.
• Evangelize what we are building and how we build it. Be a strong advocate for being interactive, outcome-oriented, using data, staying close to our users, and building systems that build trust.
• Manage delivery of new features and improvements across the company Business App, the company Lending Management System, and internal tools.
• Coordinate efforts across product squads and shared resources.
• Develop and implement new processes to improve the team’s effectiveness.
• Support the product manager to set the outcome of each sprint.
• Work with Product Managers to ensure that customer problems/product improvements are flowing efficiently from discovery to design to implementation to iteration.
• Work with Product Managers to keep the backlog prioritized based on the overall customer and business strategy.
• Ensure that all key features have the pre-specified success criteria and the tooling to be able to measure progress against that goal.
• Empower the marketing team to make decisions around customer education, pricing, go-to-market strategy.
• Build and support the Product team.
• Identify and recruit rising stars in the industry.
• Set team priorities and manage their individual & collective performance against them.
• Provide coaching for those on your team to grow technical & soft skills and develop career paths using methods such as monthly 1:1s, individual growth plans, and routine career development check-ins.
• Collaborate with colleagues to support the capacity building and professional development of members of the product team.
• Build a strong product culture that values small businesses, growth, ownership, trust, quality, and collaboration.
• Own the timeline and the budget of the product development process.

Desired Experience:

• Passion for solving problems that cause the small business credit gap in Africa.
• 7 years of experience working on a product team with at least 3 years in a leadership role.
• Past work experience implementing data-driven processes to turn a vision into an actionable roadmap.
• Solid understanding of core business processes like planning, budgeting, execution, reporting.
• Understanding how to build scalable products developed by working on a product with > 1M users.
• Experience managing or a deep understanding of the work done by engineers, product managers, designers, researchers, etc.
• Experience working on a technology product in an emerging market with preference for experience in Africa.
• Ability to drive product analytics to understand feature usage, comprehension, and optimization.
• Superb verbal and oral communication skills.

Key Skills:

Crisis Management, Marketing, Public Relations, Fundraising, Media Relations, Constant Contact, Strategic Planning, Social Media Management, Team Management, Public Speaking, Wordpress, Writing Skills