The Role

Venture Design is the process of identifying new business opportunities and developing solutions to address them. Rather than relying on serendipity, venture design looks at user needs and market opportunities and applies an iterative and creative process to create the foundations for new businesses.

Our venture design process is not about creating an exact business blueprint, as finding product market fit is an exercise in itself. Instead, our aim is to give the founding team a foundation to build upon, usually consisting of:

• An opportunity: Identify market gap and unmet user need or desire
• A solution: A credible solution hypothesis on how to address that need
• A go to market approach: Clear differentiating factors, a commercial strategy and unfair advantage
• As a Venture Builder, you will constantly research trends and markets, teasing out problems, hypothesising solutions, testing and validating their appeal, and thinking about the commercial foundations for new businesses. This involves constant ideation and rapid experimentation, so we’re looking for individuals who are both creative and analytical with strong commercial acumen. You’ll be working with individuals across our organisation as well as with stakeholders from our partners, so you must be a natural collaborator and be adept at synthesising many different inputs into a set of actionable insights.
• To succeed in this role, you must have a curious and creative mind, deep empathy for the people you’re designing for, and the ability to apply a commercial lens to everything you do. You should enjoy the messiness that is the design process and thrive in a fast-paced, constantly evolving startup environment, but be comfortable building processes and applying an analytical lens and lean methodologies to your work.

You will be:

• Identifying market trends and creating theses about what opportunities we should pursue
• Brainstorming, designing, and testing new business concepts
• Conducting qualitative research using methods such as qualitative interviews, experience mapping, service blueprints, and user journeys.
• Conducting quantitative validation studies such as smoke tests.
• Running workshops with the wider Factory team and entrepreneurs
• Collaborating with our corporate partners to leverage their expertise and assets as part of the Venture Design process
• Constantly experimenting with new technologies and tools to drive innovation and creativity
• Presenting new concepts to partners and other stakeholders
• Working with the rest of the design and product teams to act as thought leaders and to establish a POV for Venture Design at Founders Factory Africa

You must:

• Have a deep understanding of what makes a great business and how to commercialise opportunities
• Have extensive experience developing new products, services, and businesses models
• Be able to identify opportunities by looking at user needs and broader market trends
• Have a proven track record of taking ideas and bringing them to life across a range of industries
• Have a sense of how to identify key risks and validate hypotheses
• Have exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, both written and verbal
• Have worked with a variety of products and industries in your career
• Thrive in uncertainty
• Be a self-starter and comfortable working with little direction or oversight