Head of Product at BURN

About the Role:

The Head of Product position presents an exciting opportunity to roll out and manage the complete lifecycle (from development to improvement) of a suite of innovative clean cooking products in the market. This role will be responsible for all product-related matters but is not limited to product opportunity identification & evaluation, product development & design, product & innovation project management and product marketing. These four specific core responsibilities will have an associated team that will collaborate with this role and responsibilities will evolve throughout the duration of the position in line with the company’s product strategy.

BURN has been developing, testing, and bringing to market new cooking products for 10+ years in Kenya. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to join a growing organization and contribute to a fast-moving company committed to improving economic, environmental, and social outcomes across Africa.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Work closely with Global Marketing Director to evaluate new market/ product opportunity potential and prioritize product development efforts accordingly.
• Collaborate with Market research team to identify new product potential or product improvement necessity in existing, new, and untapped markets (includes user research, competitive analysis, etc.)
• Collaborate with the NPD (New Product Development) to ensure the product vision, business model and actual product are well aligned and create and continuously refine the NPD process.
• Refine and implement the product development process in NPD as new products launch
• Align detailed specifications/requirements and milestones for product development and ensure that they are within set timelines, budget and costs.
• Ensure we are solving the right problems by sourcing input from multiple channels and analyzing effectively to drive maximum impact.
• Develop mechanisms to collect ideas for new products and major variants throughout the organization and beyond.
• Ensure there is always a pipeline of pre-evaluated and prioritized ideas waiting implementation in collaboration with the R&D team (between gate 0 and 1) & the NPD team.
• Collaborate with the Legal team to ensure that all products are legally covered with the right patent and copyright protections.
• Serve as a bridge between key NPD, Finance, and Commercial business functions.
• Organizing multiple decision and evaluation criteria/timelines such as best market entry time, intellectual property strategy in new markets/new products, the product-market fit, regulatory environment of new markets impacting product development, size of opportunities, etc.

Skills and Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree in a relevant field.
• 6-10 years of relevant experience, product management, New Product development and commercialization.
• An engineering background will be a significant plus.
• Strong communicator with an overview over all moving pieces in your team and product management process.
• Tremendous experience in managing and working cross functionally with diverse teams that might span different time zones.
• A product person: a people person who knows how to set priorities and coordinate with all stakeholders within and outside of the company
• Confident and always striving to deliver the best results, considering the complexity of the system and its requirements.