Agriculture Product Associate at Apollo Agriculture

About the Role: 

We’re seeking an Agriculture Product Associate to join our Agriculture Product team and take on the exciting challenge of helping to design products that our customers love. As an Agriculture Product Associate, you will work with data and apply your background in Agriculture to recommend products that are both commercially viable and deliver a significant return on investment for our customers. 

You will take on an advisory and project management role, working closely with members of the Product, Commercial and Tech teams to oversee the design and implementation of scalable and innovative products. 

If you’re excited to apply your scientific knowledge in an organization that’s changing farmers’ lives and making a significant impact, while collaborating closely with dynamic teams, then this is the role for you. 

Reporting Lines: This role reports to the Senior Product Associate, Agriculture

Responsibilities:

• Product & project development: Utilize agile project management methods to determine the best inputs (seeds, fertilizers, chemicals), emphasizing collaboration with relevant teams, adaptability, and customer feedback, to maximize farmer return on investment.  This means for example taking full responsibility for agricultural products in the Apollo store, from advisory content, recommendations, regional mapping and pricing.
• Training design and implementation: Develop comprehensive curriculums and upskilling programs for customers, managing the entire process from ideation to execution. Implement scalable training strategies and oversee their effectiveness through evaluation and feedback mechanisms
• User research coordination, monitoring, evaluation and reporting: Incorporate Agile project management methods to effectively coordinate, monitor, evaluate, and report on user research, streamline processes, data collection, and analysis for informed decision-making.
• Agronomy mandate - Project management focus: Utilize project management strategies to bridge the gap between current farming practices and good agronomic practice methods, evaluating associated costs and benefits at each step, to improve farmer return on investment and Apollo profit margins.
• Training and Advisory -  Project management focus: Oversee the design and implementation of scalable, innovative training and advisory programs, ensuring alignment with Apollo's objectives and effective delivery. Maximize the use of all the existing infrastructure of field agents, agro-dealers,  and call centres including incentives to ensure the successful delivery of effective training to our farmers

Requirements:

• Able to apply world-class knowledge of agronomy/soil science to a range of agricultural challenges faced by smallholder farmers in Kenya.
• Comfortable generating, analyzing and synthesizing a range of data, from customer insights to large data sets.
• Excited by the challenge of working in a fast-paced scale-up environment, in some cases taking decisions with limited information or compromising to ensure commercial and operational priorities are adequately balanced.
• Not ideological about the ‘right’ model of agriculture our customers should pursue, instead recognizing there’s a range of social and environmental impact that a mission-driven business like Apollo is positioned to achieve
• Committed to learning, whether that’s working in a new environment or using new tools (e.g., SQL).
• Brilliant communicating in English (and ideally Swahili and/or another language spoken in Kenya).
• Comfortable working in and leading intercultural teams.
• A few years into your career, perhaps having worked for a research institution, corporate, or ag tech.

We:

• Are a collaborative team of smart and ambitious people who are dedicated to serving our customers. 
• Make magic happen to solve hard problems and always come up with solutions when challenges arise. 
• Are comfortable taking risks that can result in radical scale, and understand that failures are opportunities to learn and improve. 
• Are considerate listeners and take the time to deeply understand and seek out ideas from the people around us, even when we disagree. 
• Offer a dynamic environment that fosters talent, collaboration and growth. 
• Take pride in our work and share the responsibility to see it through from conception to deployment. 
• Back up our talk with a competitive compensation and benefits package and challenging projects. 
• Value autonomy, honesty, transparency, and respect. 
• Are excited to hear from you!