About Us:

Wasoko (“people of the market” in Swahili) is transforming communities across Africa by revolutionizing access to essential goods and services. We are East Africa’s biggest digitized retail distribution platform powered by our own in-house logistics network. Tens of thousands of informal retailers across seven countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Zambia) use Wasoko to order everyday essential goods and receive working capital financing.

The informal retailers of Africa today are the primary if not the only channel used by consumers to purchase essential goods worth over $600 billion per year. The fragmented infrastructure across large land mass, distributed but diverse population and rather a smaller basket size spend does not yet lend themselves to big basket retail or mass consumer eCommerce. Instead, the informal retail ecosystem is THE channel for building the plumbing for digital and consumer
commerce across Africa.

This is Wasoko’s opportunity. Wasoko with its brand, scale and logistics network is best positioned to build the technology-leveraged rails to serve the 1+ billion African consumers through informal retailers. We are building a digital-first operating system for informal retailers, initially focusing on B2B distribution but quickly incorporating other tools and services to help communities across Africa get more for less.

Background

1. Wasoko is moving to a 100% app-based, unassisted business model with field and non-field ops to support
2. While the product roadmap is being developed, there is a need to help on feeding business specs into the same e.g. tracking/events, SDKs, features etc. and to follow up on the timely build and QA from the business end
3. After the product features are built, one will need to create business governance around the funnel [GPS visits > installs > signups > segment movement from ELC to MLC to EOLC > churn etc.] and the sessions [app-open > find [browse / search] > add-to-cart > checkout > delivery > repeat] etc. - one will also need to conduct analyses to isolate the effect of various UX [on / off app] on performance.
4. One needs to flag conversions/drop-offs, diagnose RCAs, close-loop with the product team on fixed and report back on the next steps/progress.
5. One needs to spec out and build cases for resourcing areas like Web, SEO [dependent on Web], SEM [dependent on SEO], ASO, ORM, tools like CRM, MMPs, Fraud-filters etc.

Skills / Experience

The ideal candidate should have:

• Comfortable creating roadmaps prioritized by impact and effort and maintaining a balance between thought and action.
• Product/engineering + Business knowledge for prioritizing basic effort and impact
• Knowledge of the eCommerce business and stack, best practices, competitive benchmarking, UX research and basic design
• A working understanding of public stacks, libraries and tools available that can help us hack together solutions fast [vs. always building ground up]
• Excellent cross-functional working relationships and matrix navigation, often using influence to lead
• Knowledge of the Wasoko business and stack is helpful
• Comfortable with ambiguity, o to 1 build, capability to see the big picture and the transition from now to then

Key KPI’s

• Coordinate inputs for the drafting of the 2023 roadmap for a] merchant app b] backend tools c] BI & reporting; to be revised every quarter
• Execution of the agreed roadmap, flagging & escalating delays, implementation of workarounds to mitigate business impact
• Scoping and specing a] Fraud engine b] Loyalty c] Freelancer flows and new asks from time to time
• Build an experiment setup and governance for measurement and improvement of UX [search, browse, properties [e.g. deals, trending, recommended etc.] ranking, in-app merchandising, notifications, off-app notifications e.g. SMS, Whatsapp etc.
• Overall outcome metrics e.g. GMV / Customer, Session Conversion [GMV / Session, checkout / app-open], Funnel Conversion [10D FT2T, Churn from X% to Y%], user activity [CIB/EIB, MAU/EIB, DAU/MAU etc.] and flag edge-cases for RCA.
• Be the control tower on everything that changes and impacts customer traction or experience on the app.