Are you an experienced Senior Product Manager who has experience working in start-up environments and developing valuable, usable, viable and technically feasible products that users love from inception? Do you have the ability to understand the user problem and put yourself in the shoes of the customer to address their needs and add value? Are you comfortable with developing rapid prototypes and experiments to validate hypotheses while working with the Engineering team to build new features?

If this sounds like you, continue reading….

ABOUT US

In 2035, Africa will have the largest workforce in the world and will need to catalyse transformation by empowering its largest untapped resource - its people. Fuelled by this, the African Leadership Group is an ecosystem of institutions with a shared vision to harness Africa's abundant human capital and transform the continent and the world by selecting, developing, and connecting 2 million young leaders to opportunities by 2030. ALG was founded over 15 years ago by Fred Swaniker, a serial entrepreneur recognised by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2019. ALX and The Room are two brands of the African Leadership Group.

ALX is our training arm, focused on developing skills for the fourth industrial revolution (software engineering, devops, data science, etc.) to ensure that Africa is able to compete effectively as the world undergoes a digital transformation. To cement this, through our legal entity  African Leadership International (ALI), we have signed an agreement to acquire Silicon Valley based Holberton Inc. – a project-based, college alternative educating the next generation of software engineers. This will give us ownership of the advanced technology program that will enable us to provide global organizations access to significant untapped pools of talent that can bridge the growing global shortage of technology talent. For more on this, please read this article here.

The Room our talent placement arm, is a community that our young talent join to access global work opportunities. To learn more about us, please read this article about why we launched The Room & this article about the impact of our development programs on African youth. View this pitch deck to see how we present ourselves to employers.

ABOUT THE PRODUCT & UX DEPARTMENT

We are a team of passionate and dedicated data-driven Product Managers and  Ux Designers who are on a mission to to define and develop  valuable, usable, technically feasible & commercially viable digital products that our customers (internal and external) love

We adopt a lean startup mindset and are constantly testing, measuring and learning to get to product market fit and start scaling to achieve our ambitious and transformative goals.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a Senior Product Manager to own and lead all aspects of product development for one of the key platforms in our business. Platforms currently in the works include our Community platform which will build an engaging value-added community for  our graduates fostering long term relationship, two-sided Jobs Portal to help place our talent with employer partners and our Directory of innovative startups across Africa and globally to build an entrepreneurship  ecosystem.

As a Senior Product Manager, you will be responsible for the end to end product thinking for one of our key platforms. You will coordinate various team members who build the product, while constantly collecting feedback from key stakeholders and customers and incorporating it into improvements to ensure the product fits the various users’ needs.

Your mission, if you accept it, will be to own and lead all aspects of product development including the scope of development for new product features and ongoing feature improvements, backlog grooming, triage and prioritization, and cross-functional coordination to ensure completion within timelines, budget and scope. You will drive overall project progress by distilling requirements into actionable instructions for data engineers and scientists with sufficient accuracy and context.

In this role, no two days will be the same. On one day, you might find yourself writing and prioritizing user stories while defining acceptance criteria. On the next, you will need to communicate project objectives to all team members, ensuring task designation and role requirements are defined. You will be in charge of tracking progress, assessing risks, coordinating delivery, and actively communicating contingency and mitigation plans to the team.

While you might not have direct reports, you will be coordinating individuals with diverse functional backgrounds from various teams to get the product to a successful launch. You will work closely with data scientists and data engineers while collaborating productively with the Technology, Marketing, and Business teams. Your role will also be involving key stakeholders from the leadership team at the appropriate stages of the project to get successful buy-in and guidance.

Your KPIs (dependent on product):

• User and Customer NPS & CSAT

• Customer Engagement & Stickiness

• On time delivery

• Revenue (MRR)

• Customer Churn

• Shortlist to interview, Time to fill, Fill Ratio

REQUIREMENTS:.

• Bachelor’s degree in business management, STEM or related fields

• A minimum of 7 years of industry experience building products with a proven record of successfully delivering high-quality product features.

• • Experience working in a startup environment having been part of a team that has built something from scratch and scaled it. You have a high degree of comfort with experimentation, prototyping, product management.
  • Passion for coaching more junior PMs.

• Strong customer-centeredness mindset

• Experience running large projects using software development tracking tools (e.g. Jira) and project management tools (e.g. Asana)

• Strong familiarity with product management methodologies and best practices & proven ability to complete projects on time, on budget, and to scope defined

• Clear and concise communication abilities to be a bridge between multiple teams, both technical and non-technical
• Experience managing projects with remote teams across multiple time zones is a plus

We would also like to remind you that this is a remote job, which means that you can work from anywhere in the world. However, we have a preference for a GMT to GMT +4 time zone.