Junior Product Manager

Sedna; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 600,000 - 900,000; Full time

Job summary

Sedna is seeking a Product Manager to enhance its communication platform for global trade. The role involves understanding customer needs, defining product initiatives, and collaborating with teams to deliver impactful solutions. Ideal candidates are proactive with strong analytical and storytelling skills, focused on boosting productivity through innovation.

Qualifications

• 2-3 years experience as a product owner or manager.
• Ability to blend qualitative and quantitative data.
• Passion for productivity tools and new applications.

Responsibilities

• Develop deep understanding of customer needs.
• Identify and advocate for product improvements.
• Maintain product backlog and communicate updates.

Skills

Analytical skills

Strong writing

User research

Team collaboration

Job description

Title: Product Manager (Mid-weight)

Team: Product

About Sedna:

Sedna is at the forefront of revolutionising global trade, serving as the North Star for businesses navigating the complexities of international commerce. Our AI-powered platform is designed to make global trade more efficient, transparent, and sustainable. As we continue to grow and innovate, we are looking for exceptional talent to join our journey and contribute to our mission of transforming global trade.

You can find out more about us on our website: https://sedna.com/

About the role:

As a Product Manager at Sedna, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the future of how teams around the world communicate, collaborate and make decisions when moving vital commodities (food, minerals, oil, gas and more) between continents.

Your mission will be to deeply understand the needs of our customers and users, focusing on delivering solutions that address their most critical challenges.

You will drive efforts to make Stream, our collaborative communication platform for global trade, more accessible, intuitive, and powerful for our customers - and an ecosystem of partners that are extending its capabilities.

Why is Stream so important? Because conversation - email and chat - is the foundational dataset of global trade. It’s where deals are done, relationships are built, and decisions are made. Stream sits at the centre of this flow.

Walk into any of our customers’ offices and you’ll see it: Stream is open on every screen, powering the conversations that drive the business forward. With the largest dataset of trade communication in the world, Sedna is uniquely positioned to turn this untapped resource into insight and action.

Your responsibilities:

Here's a bit more on what you can expect to be doing day-to-day:

• Customer Understanding: Develop a deep understanding of customer and partner needs by collaborating with cross-functional teams, conducting user research, and usability tests. Use these insights to drive tactical decisions.
• Define Product Initiatives: Identify and advocate for high-value product improvements with a focus on user satisfaction and commercial viability.
• Team Collaboration: Inspire and motivate product designers (UX/UI) and engineers. Foster an environment of creativity, collaboration, and continuous improvement to craft new solutions that are a joy to use.
• Delivery and communication: Maintain your pillar backlog to ensure a consistent cadence of product evolution, prioritising tasks to meet your goals and mitigate risk. Actively communicate project status and blockers to stakeholders across the organisation.
• Go-to-Market Support: Support the rollout of new features by working closely with Product Marketing, Customer Success, and Customer Support. Ensure that new functionalities are effectively communicated and adopted.
  
  

In your first 90 days, you can expect:

Learning and familiarisation: onboard and orientate yourself with Sedna’s products, value proposition, personas, and the global trade market. Meet your team, cross functional colleagues and start connecting and building relationships with usersContribution and strategic planning: familiarise yourself with existing user feedback and research. Work with design to test and validate your ideas to create high fidelity designs. Take ownership of your product pillar and prioritisation by creating product requirements documents (PRDs) in Notion, epics, stories and tasks in Jira. Collaborate with QA, Engineering and Design to ensure work is thoroughly tested before going out in production. Leadership and measurable impact: Run your own research, oversee the go to market motion by working closely with Marketing, Sales and Customer Operations to deliver high quality features that solves customer problems. Flexibly adjust your roadmap based on feedback, data, metrics and market changes.

What We're Looking For:

• 2-3 years experience as a product owner or manager with a track record of successfully launching and scaling impactful products.
• Strong analytical skills, with the ability to blend qualitative and quantitative data to inform decisions and drive strategic directions.
• Strong writing / storytelling skills - you must be able to document your findings and strategies so the organisation can run with them.
• A passion for productivity tools, you are obsessive about scouring Product Hunt and other sites for new email, calendar and collaboration apps.
  
  

Our Values:

Finally, culture is important to us, so we also look for candidates who share our values:

Stay Ahead, Stay Agile

• We don’t just adapt-we anticipate change and act with confidence.
• Curiosity, data, and customer insights help us stay ahead of the curve.
• We embrace challenges as opportunities and remain resilient under pressure.
• By staying open to new ideas and ways of working, we lead the future.
  
  

Execute With Focus

• We turn strategy into action, delivering measurable results that matter.
• Every initiative counts-discipline and ownership drive business impact.
• We make smart decisions with speed, balancing pace and precision.
• Clear priorities keep us focused on what moves the needle.
  
  

Work Together, Win Together

• Collaboration is our superpower-we succeed as one team, internally and with customers.
• We co-create solutions, seek feedback, and build the future of the OS together.
• Strong relationships are built on trust, respect, and shared goals.
• By aligning across teams and with customers, we unlock greater impact.