Product Lead at Founders Factory Africa (FFA)

Job Description

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Founders Factory Africa (FFA) is unlike any place else you’ve ever worked. We are venture builders dedicated to solving some of Africa’s biggest challenges and capitalizing on it’s incredible potential by leveraging market and tech opportunities. Over the next five years, we’ll build 24 businesses from scratch and scale 64 existing growth-stage ventures through our venture development programs. Backed by leading corporates, such as Standard Bank – the continent’s largest bank – we have access to their vast resources, infrastructure, and expertise and will bring those to bear for all our ventures and entrepreneurs. Starting with FinTech, HealthTech, and AgriTech FFA will expand our focus as we grow, adding other sectors.

The Role

We are looking for a Product Lead to join our team and support our ventures. At FFA, Product Leads ensure that we provide our founders and their product teams with the support they need to build the best products & services possible. This means acting as both a strategic coach and facilitator as well as a collaborator, executing alongside founders and teams to unlock insights and drive momentum. The Product Lead brings FFA’s process, principles, and resources to bear, setting our ventures up for success by helping them build the right things the right way. Success in this role requires an ability to facilitate Design thinking and iterative building and agile processes as you coach entrepreneurs through product tools and frameworks, identify strategic business risks, and execute experiments to remove them.This role is hybrid, located in Lagos, Nigeria or Nairobi, Kenya.

Responsibilities:

Build productive, collaborative relationships with founders Act as a product coach, raising founders’ product thinking, resilience and customer empathy by leveraging expertise in product development best practices Onboard founders to FFA’s product development processes Continuously monitor product performance – balancing business goals with customer needs – with an experimentation mindset, coordinate between Growth Leads, Product Designers and Engineers Facilitate workshops and lead work sessions with both ventures and internal FFA teams, including hypothesis development, story mapping, user journeys, retros, etc. Develop and lead user research activities, including interviews, UAT, surveys, etc. Support teams in turning insights into action, including creation of user stories, and initial backlog development Own FFA’s product-related OKRs on given programs, identifying, tracking and reporting on key performance metrics Help define “what a good product looks like” for African and emerging markets, by uncovering and cataloguing key insights from work with our startups. Help develop product capability as a discipline at FFA working with leadership to define approach and build FFA’s repository of product-related resources, including relevant templates, tools, thought leadership, etc Define and ensure execution of FFA’s product processes and monitor adherence across portfolio Support FFA’s talent team to assist our ventures with hiring the right product talent.

You should be:

 A proven product leader with over 5 years of experience working with interdisciplinary teams to deliver digital products that users love Human-centred and empathetic in your approach, employing tools, techniques, and processes that put users and customers at the centre of the products you develop Familiar with product management process and philosophies (agile, scrum, etc.) and experienced in coaching teams and individuals in adopting them Able to prioritise across multiple concurrent projects and ensure clarity for the team on what’s important and what’s not Experienced leading teams, ensuring the product vision and goals are understood and shaping the approach taken to achieve them Able to motivate teams, bringing out the best in them to collaborate on innovative approaches to solving complex problems Experienced in working with others to set ambitious goals and taking responsibility to meet them, while knowing when to seek support Comfortable with the ambiguity that comes from working in a fast-paced environment and adaptable to changing market needs

Benefits:

Growth: Work with and meet exceptional talent. and learn faster than you ever have before. Variety: Opportunity to work on hundreds of different products across a variety of sectors Health and Wellness: Comprehensive extended health care coverage Network: Founders Factory Africa is part of the strongest global network for startup founders. Our relationships with corporate executives, established entrepreneurs, and funders are unparalleled.