Senior Technical Product Manager Telco Integration and Merchants at Equity Bank Kenya

Role Summary:

• The senior technical product managers will be a key member of the ICT & Product House organization. The role will be responsible for the technical success of the Merchants and Telco Integrations payments products. They will be crucial in product strategy formulation. The products include but are not limited to all telco integration, B2C, C2B, agent services and merchants’ payments as well as new developments such as telco supported cross boarder payments.
• The role will report to the Payments Director ICT. The role will be working closely with project managers, product owners, QAs, product analysts and solution architects as well as the larger ICT team from the bank. The role will be the key bridge between the internal technical team and telco and 3rd parties’ technology and service provider technical teams. The role will be crucial in the design and implementation of merchant’s notification integrated services. 
• The role will be accorded the freedom, support, and encouragement to think big and prove out disruptive solutions on behalf of our customers and business. The ideal candidate must believe in the power of APIs, be jazzed about delivering amazingly simple experiences that transform and improve people’s lives through simple, straightforward digital tools and technology.

Responsibilities:

• Build effective relationships with internal business team, operations, ICT, product and design team, and external partner.
• Participate in stakeholder management: strategize, execute, and communicate. ensure alignment of business goals with the incremental delivery of solutions.
• Lead the definition of product requirements using input from various sources including external sources such as market trends, technology innovations, industry standards, bold intelligence, and customer research, as well as internal sources such as analytics, marketing, operations, and customer feedback.
• Manage feature prioritization & trade-off decision making while leading other Technical Product Managers, business & engineering teams.
• Lead the design and conceptualization of the customer experience including the look & feel of the customer journeys, development of functional designs and wireframes, creation of product collateral, and user interfaces.
• Ensure delivery of scalable, reliable, and maintainable platforms and solutions
• Assess the business impact of different solutions and the trade-offs between customer needs, technology requirements and costs.
• Lead and work closely with technical product managers across all products and channels capabilities to prioritize initiatives, share insights on customer demands, identify opportunities for teamwork, and coordinate product development and delivery.
• Ensure Knowledge Transfer and hand off to Support teams and users.

Qualifications

Required Skills:

• Demonstrated leadership, maturity, and organizational abilities.
• Strong written & verbal communication skills
• superior interpersonal & collaboration skills with demonstrated ability to use diplomacy & communication skills to influence outcomes and influence others without authority.
• Experience and expertise in project planning, product definition, feature prioritization, and roadmap creation.
• Strong analytical skills with hands on experience in conducting technological analyses of business problems developing technical roadmaps, story outlines, writing user stories, refining product backlogs, and coordinating/prioritizing conflicting requirements in a fast-paced, demanding environment.
• The ability to work across geographies, understand the diverse cultures and manage people and partners cross culturally is a must.
• Demonstrated ability manage multiple products delivery.
• Ability to set expectations and hold individuals and team members accountable to their commitments.
• Experience with Design Thinking or similar empathy-driven customer-focused design methodologies.
• Customer-centric mindset with a passion for discovering consumer behavior, trends, and opportunities for innovation.
• Business Analysis experience in a high-tech company or a reputable fintech is a plus.
• Basic understanding of programming languages, software architecture, data analytics, MI reporting etc.
• Ability to Keeps up with industry trends.

 Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, engineering, or related field required. MBA in addition is preferred.
• 7+ years’ experience as a technical lead or similar role related to telco and merchants' products.
• Experience with traditional payments methods and technologies such as cheques, payments cards, international money transfer systems, and clearing houses.
• Understanding of payment industry partners and business, fintech’s, merchants, agents, billers among others
• Aware and inquisitive of payments progressive trends, blockchain, tokenization, contactless, machine to machine commerce, IoT, QR Codes, and micro transactions among others.
• Must have worked in a banking environment and be able to have a 360 perspective of banking and payments interfaces.
• Be able to evaluate and gauge core banking products such as card switches, middleware, terminal management systems, and API providers involved in the payments cycle and craft new products from their capabilities.
• Demonstrate understanding of the end-to-end payments process from origination to fulfilment and the underlying system components.