Product Owner - Commercial Excellence at Greenspoon Kenya

What this role is

• This is a senior role, owning one of our 8 product teams. You will own the tools that the commercial team uses to run the business day to day. That covers out-of-stocks, supplier contracts, margins, rebates, promotions, and the products we sell to suppliers (ad slots, featured placements, sponsored listings, promo spots).
• Right now most of this work lives in spreadsheets, WhatsApp, and people's heads. We want to fix that by building proper internal tools following best practices, and we need someone to lead the product side of it.

Why we are hiring

• We want stronger relationships with our suppliers, and we want to be able to grow the business without our commercial team having to grow at the same rate. Today, most supplier work runs on personal relationships and spreadsheets. That has worked so far. It will not keep working as we keep adding categories, SKUs and suppliers.
• With proper tools, the commercial team can manage more suppliers, with real data behind every meeting and renewal. We can also start treating things like ad slots, featured placements and promo inventory as products we sell, rather than ad-hoc deals.

This is a new product area for us, and you would be the first person on it.

What we need

• We need a real builder. Someone who looks at a messy operational area, sees the structural fix, and ships it once so the team does not have to keep solving the same problem every month.
• A lot of commercial work today is firefighting. We need someone who can step back, understand the root cause, and build the system that prevents the fire from starting again.

What you will work on

• Supplier contracts. Get every agreement, payment term, listing fee and commitment into one place where we can actually find it. Make renewals and renegotiations easier and more data-driven.
• Out of stocks. Cut the OOS rate. Build tools that tell the commercial team which SKUs are running low, why, and what to do about it. Forecasting, alerts, supplier follow-ups, substitution rules.
• Product lifecycle and catalog hygiene. Own how SKUs move through the system, from onboarding a new product through to delisting one that is no longer working. Build the tools that make sure every product is set up properly from day one with clean titles, proper images, accurate pricing, complete descriptions and the right categorisation. Keep the catalog standardised as we grow.
• Margins. Give the commercial team live visibility on margins by SKU, category, supplier and basket. Help them catch leakage during the month, not at the end of it.
• Rebates. Track what we are owed, what threshold we are chasing, and what we need to claim. Make sure we collect everything we are due.
• Promotions. Make it easier to plan, price and measure good promos. Help the team run more of them, with less manual work, and learn which ones actually work.
• Selling to suppliers. Build the product side of our supplier-facing revenue. Ad slots, featured placements, sponsored listings, promo inventory. Define what we sell, how it is priced, and how the commercial team manages the pipeline. Move us away from one-off deals.

How you will work

You will act like the owner of this product area, reporting to the COO. That means:

• Setting the strategy and roadmap with the COO and commercial leadership
• Spending real time with the commercial team, in the warehouse, and in supplier meetings. The best tools come from understanding the actual workflow
• Picking the right metrics and being honest about whether you are moving them
• Writing the specs, prioritising the backlog, working with your engineering squad, shipping, and measuring
• Defaulting to building in-house, since this is core to how we operate
• Using AI tools to prototype small internal tools yourself when it makes sense. Turn data into insight into action quickly, without waiting for a full engineering cycle every time
• Fixing things once. If the same issue is coming up twice, build the structural solution so it does not come up a third time
• Making sure the team actually uses what you build. If they do not, it is on you to figure out why

What we are looking for

• 5-10 years work experience in highly demanding role (strategy consulting, investment banking, leadership role in corporate, start-up, scale-up)
• Previous experience in product teams or a keen interest
• You have shipped internal tools or operational software before, not just consumer features. Even better if it was for commercial, merchandising, supply chain, pricing or retail media teams
• A background in e-commerce, marketplaces, retail, logistics, or software for retailers is preferred. Grocery experience is a bonus, not a must
• You are comfortable with commercial concepts: gross margin, contribution margin, trade terms, listing fees, MOQs, promo mechanics, sell-through, retail media. You can hold your own in a supplier negotiation
• Technically literate. You can read SQL, sketch a data model, and have a real point of view on how things should be built
• Comfortable using AI tools to prototype small internal tools yourself. You enjoy connecting data to insight to action, and you fix problems once rather than repeatedly
• A structural thinker who designs the system that removes a recurring problem, rather than solving it again each time it appears
• You can make decisions without perfect information, and you own the outcome
• You listen well, ask good questions, and operate with low ego

What success looks like after a year

• A clear product strategy for this area that leadership has bought into
• A full tool stack that is used by the commercial team to execute the day-to-day
• Measurable improvement on: gross margin, rebate capture, advertising revenue or promo ROI
• The commercial team relies on what you have built every day