Job Purpose
The Chief Product Officer (CPO) is a leadership role responsible for developing and managing the company’s product portfolio, ensuring alignment with overall business strategy, operations, and technology advancements. The CPO will serve as the bridge between technology engineering, operations, and strategy teams to establish a clear and inspiring product vision and strategy. The role involves leading the complete rebuild of the core financial lending platform, managing product development cycles, and implementing efficient processes to enhance product development transparency and effectiveness.
Roles & Responsibilities
Act as the liaison between the engineering, data, operations and strategy teams to continuously adapt a clear and inspiring technology product vision and strategy.
Support and inform the overall technology vision and strategy together with the Board, CEO and CTO
Determine overall product roadmap to achieve the product vision in alignment with team priorities and industry technology trends
Support the end-to-end evolution of 4G Capital’s core financial lending platform, identifying approach, requirement definitions, architectural prototyping, technical build planning, and transition planning to manage evolution of optimal processes, features and capabilities.
Actively manage product development backlogs for existing platforms, prioritising new development requests alongside long term product roadmap activities to plan development cycles
Support business teams to define new product features following human centered design methodologies; document process flow diagrams, wireframes, and functional and technical requirements to allow for successful tech team development
Implement and oversee processes to make product development cycles more efficient and transparent for both IT and ops / strategy teams
Identify test plans for newly developed product features; organize and oversee user acceptance testing for final feature development signoff
Define release process and schedule to bring newly developed product features to market
Develop and implement product change management and communications plans that close the communications gap between business and IT teams while garnering awareness, understanding, and support of the technology product and development efforts within the organization
Support the development of technology product related marketing and/or business development materials as needed
Required Skills for a Chief Product Officer
Degree in Finance, Business Administration, Computer Science or other relevant field
At least five years of proven Product Management experience working at the intersection of technology and operations to bring new products to market for multinational organizations; at least three years of product management experience for multinational organizations within East Africa desired
At least five years of experience leading multinational technology development teams across North America, Africa, and Asia, with proven success managing and integrating remote team members with on the ground development teams
At least three years of experience managing financial lending platform development from conception to implementation within East Africa; direct experience with leading telco mobile money and SMS platform integration necessary
Experience successfully executing a full end-to-end platform of a major financial services or e-commerce platform that used a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) or Microservices
Knowledge of human centered design methodologies and experience implementing them within East Africa across a variety of technical product modalities (USSD, SMS, mobile smart applications, web applications, desktop platforms, etc)
Experience leading software development projects directly executive level sponsors, and proven success liaising and communicating technology needs and updates to multinational executive leadership teams
Experience developing organization-level digital strategies and business cases for technology investment
At least five years of experiencing developing and successfully implementing organizational change management and communications strategies for major new technology products, processes, and features within organizations, to increase the likelihood of successful adoption by business teams
At least five years of experience designing and leading business training programs around new products and features developed
At least three years of experience leading technology product related business development and marketing activities within East Africa, with a demonstrated ability to raise funding for technology project when required
Experience managing technology multinational software consultants, including the understanding of contracting, invoicing, and deliverable management mechanisms
Strong market orientation, entrepreneurial and innovative thinker
Proven ability to work independently, delivering high-quality end products
Previous successful experience mentoring and building capacity of staff
High proficiency in PowerPoint and Excel; experience using software development and business work planning tools like Jira and Wrike
Verbal and written fluency in English
Ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, employing effective time management and organizational skills
Ability to work independently and as a team to meet deadlines, goals and objectives
Passion for learning new technologies and programming languages
Resourcefulness and troubleshooting aptitude
Excellent critical thinking skills
Relationships
CEO; Direct line manager, who will offer ongoing support and supervision, as well as the conduit to the Management Board
CTO; Liaise with CTO to establish timelines, product roadmap and design
Subordinates/Direct Reports; Determine work priorities; schedule work assignments; select, orient, train, evaluate work performance and recommend associated personnel action; provide staff with clear and concise written guidelines.
External Stakeholders; Manage and maintain these strategic alliances
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