A kiosk is an informal convenience store selling everyday household items. Known locally by their vernacular names e.g. Duka in Kenya, Spaza in South Africa, Kantemba in Zambia. kiosk-type retail outlets are the cornerstone of African retail, accounting for over 60% of all retail trade flows. Despite their importance, kiosk-type retail outlets face significant challenges, including high cost of stock and unreliable delivery

Role Profile

We are looking for an experienced Product Manager – Financial Services to own all our payments-related products from discovery to execution and rally a remote cross-functional team to deliver them and iterate until the user and business outcomes are met.

The Product Manager we are looking for will guide our Financial Services Development Team towards the automation and digitization of both payment collections and payment disbursements, via a plethora of different payment methods, across multiple countries in Africa.

As PM you will need to innovate on behalf your colleagues, based on a deep understanding of users’ pain points as well as business needs and priorities. You will utilise metrics to measure and effectively manage the deployment of solutions that optimize various customer-facing apps.

To be successful in this role you will need to be detail oriented, able to surface relevant business analysis and an analytical problem solver. You will need to think and act fast, deal with ambiguity and be able to develop ideas into scalable products that work on a Pan-African scale.

This is a rare opportunity to impact not just the future of Kyosk, but the future of digital service delivery across Africa.

 Key Responsibilities:

• Product Ownership: Own your specific product roadmap. Define what needs to be built in line with the company’s objectives and product strategy for your product line by ensuring product/market fit.  You will be responsible for grooming and maintaining the product backlog.
• Market Analysis: Assess the product landscape as related to new customer needs, feeding our roadmap and backlog for continuing product development and enhancements. Collaborate with other stakeholders to conduct user research and gather customer feedback to inform future product development and optimization.
• Product Analysis – Develop business cases and product design documents based on priority capturing user-journeys, market feedback, pricing analysis and other relevant metrics to inform product prioritization decisions.
• Product Definition: Collaborate with Engineering to discuss release planning, Proof-of-Concepts and agree on specific timelines for functional solutions. Help to champion and model an agile approach to product design and management.
• User Experience enhancement: As the primary owner of the User Experience for your product, you will translate user research and hypothesis testing into product requirements to enhance user experience. Work closely with User Interface Design to craft simple, valuable experiences that can be captured into the business requirements documentation.
• Product Review: Conduct regular user testing and analyses of products and services to ensure they are meeting user needs and growing the retention metric. Review and report on your products key success metrics. Monitor the project and keep stakeholders updated on progress and escalate any risks to delivery.
• Documentation: Occasionally create support and training documents for users. Produce and prioritise product backlogs and other relevant project documentation using the team tools provided.

 Skills & Key Competencies:

Required:

• Degree in Computer Science, or Business Administration, or related technical degree.
• Between 2-7 years’ experience as a product manager within a technical environment, with a focus on building and delivering customer-centric solutions;
• Between 2 and 5 years’ experience in product management for digital payment products, whether integrating platforms with digital payment providers, or in building in-house digital payment products. Relevant experience includes: building/integrating with mobile money solutions, digitized credit card and POS payments, digital bank transfers, e-wallet infrastructures.
• Communication – Excellent communication and presentation skills — to motivate, influence and lead a cross-functional team toward a goal, while also getting buy-in from others (whether that be someone on another team or an exec).  Prepare and deliver various product portfolio-related presentations, both internally and externally.
• Ownership – Must take on tasks and workstreams with full ownership to execution.  Quick to take the blame if something goes wrong, and equally quick to give credit to the rest of the team when it goes well
• Collaboration – Demonstrated experience creating product plans and a story to explain what’s next while also taking into account the many moving parts across a team, product, or organization.  Internally, you’ve closely worked with Engineering, Design and Data/Data Science using an Agile methodology and development sprints.
• Time management — distinguish between urgent, and important, and know how to prioritize and plan your time.  A desire for continuous improvement and ability to work under pressure and with tight timelines. Experience in handling the pressure of fast-paced, startup environments where you wore multiple hats and used limited resources
• User understanding — to empathize, listen, and co-create with the end customer and solve an existing pain point or identify new pain points.  You have an eye for good design and user experience.
• Work Ethic — genuine care for the product and willingness to go to any necessary length to ensure its success;

Desired: 

• Empathy for, and experience in working with people in lower socio-economic segments.
• Experience in a high growth of startup environment with an emphasis on speed.
• Previous experience with toolsets –  Jira, Confluence and Productboard