Product Manager - Financial Services

Job Description: Product Manager - Financial Services

Location: Remote in Africa, Nairobi

Reporting to : Product Director

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:

• 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 

About the Company:

At Kyosk.App we take immense pride in our role as a Business to Business Technology Platform. We are dedicated to bridging the gap in digital distribution to middle and low-income communities, including smallholder farmers. Our platform is truly product and service agnostic, empowering companies to connect with these communities through local retail outlets.

Today, we are thrilled to share that we serve a thriving community of over 250,000 Retailers on our Platform. We leverage the small retail outlets as a channel to connect with these communities by providing a seamless and direct link between suppliers, traditional retailers as well as farmers and local eateries. Across Africa over 60% of retail trade flows through these small outlets commonly referred to as kiosks. We are on a mission to provide them with an extensive range of high-quality products, all delivered reliably to their doorsteps at fair market prices.

We also help manufacturers and farmers expand their network and product range by providing last mile deliveries to hard-to reach communities as well as data for better demand and business planning.

The platform does not only support product distribution but also helps service providers such as financial institutions to reach and provide their services (for example credit, savings and insurance) to the communities via our network of small retail outlets - Kiosks. 

Looking forward to you reaching out if you are interested in being considered to be a part of Kyosk.App's success story.