Senior Product Manager at M-KOPA Solar

The role

M-KOPA is seeking a Senior Product Manager for the M-KOPA Mobile Product. This role sits at the nexus between the business and technology to drive the software development for our most important product. The essential functions of the mobile software product include secure device locking, customer acquisition and registration, account management, and mobile money payment integrations with our telecom partners. Our goal is for the M-KOPA mobile application to become a personalized hub for our customers, allowing them to manage their loans, view their balances, pay for their products in installments, request and upgrade to new services, and support their financial development. While there has always been software that allows M-KOPA to control the devices that we offer, the M-KOPA mobile product represents a fundamental shift towards managing customer facing software products across the business.

Responsibilities

• You will be the owner of the M-KOPA Mobile Software Product.
• You will hear big ideas from all corners of the business and distill them into our mobile product roadmap.
• You will help many business stakeholders come to a consensus on backlog prioritization and clarify relevant trade-offs.
• You will manage the product to achieve goals and hit feature launch timelines.
• You are an excellent collaborator. You will find the right methods to communicate with internal stakeholders to gather feature requirements, share updates on timelines, design around constraints, carefully manage expectations, and craft appropriate communications for the appropriate audience.
• Likewise, you will collaborate closely with engineering during the development cycle to make judgment calls as engineering constraints arise, with a bias towards shipping valuable work each sprint and iteratively improving on it later.
• You will become the authority on our mobile software, a resource for others in the company to rely on.
• You will work closely with market research teams to understand user needs, define a vision for the product, and advocate for the voice of the customer throughout the product lifecycle.
• To get a broad array of stakeholders aligned and invested, you will draft and present “product brief” and process map documentation to outline high-level scope for Epic and Feature level work.
• You will write feature specifications in user stories along with acceptance criteria in Gherkin syntax format.
• Using agile product process, you will move the user stories through refinement to meet our definition of ready.
• You enjoy communicating visually. You are comfortable refining wireframes and process maps to guide product design. From there, you will actively drive the design process with our nascent product designer, and perhaps outside designers.
• You will stay up to date with the requirements that our grant obligations place on our software roadmap and advocate for language in our grant proposals that is best for our core business.
• You lead by example, modeling Product Management best practices for the product team and the business. You are comfortable advocating for process improvements that will clear the path for you to do your best work.

Required Experience:

• Required education: No requirement
• Required relevant work experience: 4 years, including 1 year on a native mobile app
• Required languages: English (Spoken: fluent | Written: fluent)

Preferred Experience:

• Preferred education: Masters of Business Administration
• Preferred relevant work experience: 6 years, mostly on native mobile apps
• Preferred languages: Fluent in English and proficient in a national language from one
• of our target markets