Head of Product, Merchant Solutions (SMME) at Safaricom Kenya

Responsibilities

• Strategy and roadmap: Define the merchant product vision, segmentation and multi-year roadmap across micro, small and medium merchants, tied to clear commercial outcomes (active merchants, usage, revenue, credit attach).
• Portfolio: Own the full merchant stack: acceptance (till, Buy Goods, Paybill, QR), merchant apps and portals, notifications, reconciliation, business tools and value-added services.
• Activation before build: Prioritise getting merchants to use what already exists before building new. Run structured experiments on onboarding, configuration and engagement, and hold the team to measurable movement.
• Working capital and credit: Partner with financial services to design merchant working-capital and credit journeys that use transaction data well, and fix where the funnel breaks.
• Identity and platform foundations: Drive a single merchant identity and a common data model across products, so every merchant has one view of their business, and every market can reuse what Kenya builds.
• Data and insight: Set the evidence base: define the core merchant metrics and denominators, instrument journeys, and make roadmap decisions from data and merchant research rather than opinion.
• Vendors and delivery: Lead product input into vendor selection and contracts, with particular attention to data rights, IP and reuse across markets. Manage delivery with internal engineering and external partners.
• Team and practice: Build and lead a high-performing product team; set the product operating rhythm (discovery, PRDs, release, post-launch review).

Qualifications

Essential

• 10+ years in product management, with at least 4 years leading product teams or a product portfolio.
  Deep experience in mobile money, payments or fintech in Africa, ideally with merchant, SME or agent products at scale.
• A track record of launching and growing products in Kenya or comparable East African markets, with measurable commercial results.
• Strong grasp of merchant payments economics: acceptance, pricing, settlement, reconciliation and merchant lifecycle.
• Data fluency: comfortable defining metrics, working with analysts and SQL outputs, and designing experiments.
• Experience working across complex stakeholder environments (operators, group functions, regulators, partners) and influencing without direct authority.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including presenting to senior executives.
• Bachelor's degree in business, economics, engineering, computer science or related field.

Desirable

• Multi-market product experience across several African countries.
• Exposure to SME lending, working capital or data-driven credit products.
• Experience managing third-party technology vendors and commercial contracts.
• Knowledge of Central Bank of Kenya and regional payments and data protection regulation.
• MBA or relevant postgraduate qualification.