Head Of Product Development at Precision Agriculture for Development (PAD)

Responsibilities (including but not limited to):
In this role, you will lead the capture of ideas, feature needs, evidence-based learnings and market knowledge and use those to generate impactful product and service designs. You will liaise in the development of those products and participate in the ongoing improvement of services that maximize the scale and depth of adoption and impact of PxD’s programs, globally.

You will do this by: 

• Collating a shortlist and pipeline of potential new ideas, services, features, or workflows
• Working with country teams, professional groups, and the new programmes team to develop proposals
• Participating in the early-stage design and development of new services or features and various special projects as appropriate
• Working with Country Directors and programme teams to improve effectiveness of services by identifying opportunities and helping teams to focus on priorities
• Working with our Research, Data and Engineering teams to bring these designs to life
• Supporting, mentoring, and coordinating the work of current and future PxD Product Managers
• Providing initial Product Development Management support for very early-stage services that do not yet have a team hired, where needed
• Driving a human-centred approach and impact focus throughout product design and development processes
• Participating in user discovery, user research, and design thinking among new and existing product teams, through advice, consultations, workshops, etc., with the goal of achieving superior product-market fit
• Supporting idealisation and experimentation around alternative approaches to content, leading to high engagement and adoption

Key deliverables: Setup a common product design and development focus within our global teams and get agreement to a pipeline and roadmap of new features, services, workflows, and user experiences; Operationalise our product design and development strategy globally

We need someone who has (or can quickly develop) the following skills:

• Team and project management skills
• Entrepreneurial with a problem-solving mentality
• Good stakeholder management and engagement skills
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to collaborate, influence and generate confidence, trust, and respect
• Keen to learn and maintain flexibility of approach
• Ability to simplify and explain complex issues to a range of audiences
• Understanding of research and evidence
• Able to implement effective systems to monitor performance
• Ability to encourage innovative ideas to drive improvement
• Resilient, reliable and outcome focused.

We think that people with a variety of backgrounds could be a good fit for this role, including product managers and engineering managers. Qualification and experience in the following domains would also be useful (but isn’t required): 

• Science or engineering related discipline
• Marketing, Business Administration or Entrepreneurship
• Service design, UX and user engagement