Summary
Date Posted: Wednesday, June 12 2024, Base Salary: Not Disclosed

JOB DETAILS:
A kiosk is an informal convenience store selling everyday household items. Known locally by their vernacular names e.g. Duka in Kenya, Spaza in South Africa, Kantemba in Zambia. kiosk-type retail outlets are the cornerstone of African retail, accounting for over 60% of all retail trade flows. Despite their importance, kiosk-type retail outlets face significant challenges, including high cost of stock and unreliable delivery.

Role Profile
• We are looking for an experienced Product Manager (PM) to spearhead the creation of business value and growth through product and technology. At Kyosk, product managers collaborate closely with business leaders and head of departments to deliver a product strategy and product roadmap that creates tangible business value, whether in terms of increased revenue or reduced costs.
• The Product Manager we are looking for will be particularly focused on the digitization and automation of our Support Functions, in particular Finance, Accounting, Purchasing, and Human Resources. However, we are first and foremost looking for a candidate with expertise and competence in product management, someone who would be able to apply product management principles to any domain or industry.
• As PM you will need to innovate on behalf of your colleagues, based on a deep understanding of users’ pain points as well as business needs and priorities. You will utilize 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 and creation of business value (revenue growth, cost reduction, reduced risk). You will be responsible for defining, updating, and delivering the product strategy.
• Commercial Results: Deliver product solutions whose business impact is clearly measurable in terms of either revenue increase, cost reduction, or risk mitigation. Identify and prioritize product and tech-driven solutions based on business KPIs. Collaborate with Heads of Business Units and Country Directors to develop product-driven strategies, in order to spearhead business growth via product and technology.
• Go-to-market strategy: Lead the product launch and go-to-market strategies for all the products in your portfolio, ensuring tight collaboration with the Business Unit Leaders and the Country Directors. Specific responsibilities include the development of brand and marketing strategy in collaboration with the commercial and marketing team, product training plan for all key stakeholders (including preparation of training material and execution of product walkthroughs), rollout plan with a phased approach (pilot small, scale fast), performance monitoring against the estimated business value. Product launches should be executed in an agile manner, i.e. bringing the product to market quickly, starting on a small scale. Clear KPIs and targets should be set for every launch. Data should be gathered and monitored from inception, so that the effectiveness of the solution can be immediately measured, and further iterations can be delivered in a swift cadence.
• User Journey Analysis: Identify the end to end user journey for all the key personas, operations, and activities within your domain, and use the user journey to identify where gaps and inefficiencies are, which can be tackled by product-led solutions. After identifying the gaps, use data to understand which problems need to be prioritized. Identify the best solution to the prioritized problems, both in the short and in the long term. Base your solution identification on a business impact vs feasibility matix.
• User Research & 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. Execute market research initiatives around customer needs and product validation. Provide technical expertise to assist in their execution. Stay connected with market needs through frequent interaction with customers. Frequent visits to our warehouses and markets are necessary, in order to talk to customers, sales agents, drivers, and warehouse personnel, i.e. the end users of our systems.
• Portfolio Planning & Product Development - Contribute to portfolio plans aligned to company strategy. Partner with R&D and counterpart to lead product development programs. Responsible for contributing to product scope, providing design inputs, validating product design, and developing of launch messaging and materials, set configurations, etc. Leverage strong understanding of product development process and functional areas (quality, regulatory, etc.) to ensure on-time launches.
• Business Planning & Execution - Work closely with manager to develop business plans related to area of focus (i.e. business segment, product, region, etc.). Collaborate with other functional areas to execute plan.
• Product Analysis - Develop business cases and product requirement documents based on priority capturing user journeys, market feedback, and other relevant metrics to inform product prioritization decisions.
• Release Planning & Cadence: Collaborate with both business stakeholders and engineering to define the release planning. Ensure that timelines for releases meet the business expectations. Collaborate with the Engineering Managers to ensure that agreed upon timelines are consistently met.
• 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. Collaborate with design and engineering to define and execute effective A/B testing, prototypes, and MVPs.
• 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.
• General Business Support - Develop strong relationships with customers and key business stakeholders. Be responsive in responding to requests from customers and the customer experience executives. Work collaboratively with functional areas and Strategic Partners to ensure business issues are addressed.
Required

Skills & Key Competencies:
• Degree in Computer Science, Business Administration, or related degree.
• Between 2-7 years’ experience as a product manager in a software development environment, with a focus on building and delivering customer-centric solutions.
• 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 work streams 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
• Between 2 and 5 years' experience in product management for ERP systems, accounting systems, reconciliation systems, financial management systems, invoicing systems, and similar.
• 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

Work Hours: 8

Experience in Months: 24

Level of Education: Bachelor Degree

Job application procedure

Method of Application
Interested and qualified? Go to Kyosk Digital Services on kyosk.hire.trakstar.com to apply



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