Job Opportunities at Arifu

Job description

Arifu is looking to hire a Product Manager to drive the success of our multi-country learning platform and enhance Arifu’s value proposition to our clients and end-users. Arifu reached over one million users in 2019 with a rapidly growing active user base. The Product Manager is responsible for the product planning and execution throughout the product life cycle, including gathering and prioritizing product and customer requirements, defining the product vision, and working closely with engineering, sales, marketing and support to ensure revenue and customer satisfaction goals are met.

The Product Manager’s job also includes ensuring that the product supports the company’s overall strategy and goals. Delivering excellence at Arifu depends on efficient cross-team collaboration working with learning experts, computer scientists, corporate partnership development teams, as well as social scientists. As such, the Product Manager needs to absolutely love taking on new challenges, bring a problem-solving focus, and be willing to have fun under pressure while being uncompromising on quality delivery. Lastly, they should be driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, be able to write and communicate technical ideas to different audiences, and love learning from the variety of skill-sets and experiences at Arifu and Arifu’s partners.

Most importantly, if you feel you have many of these attributes, but not all, no worries! We do not expect you to be superhuman. The most invaluable trait you can bring to Arifu is your ability to identify areas for growth, bring a deep willingness to learn, and let us invest in you. This is a full-time position based at Arifu’s headquarters in Nairobi reporting to the CTO.

Responsibilities

The Product Manager will be responsible for:

• Defining the product strategy and roadmap; Be an expert with respect to the competition
• Delivering MRDs and PRDs with prioritized features and corresponding justification
• Working with external third parties to assess partnerships and licensing opportunities
• Running beta and pilot programs with early-stage products and samples
• Acting as a leader within the company; Build an ambitious but achievable product roadmap for the Arifu platform;
• Structuring technical implementation plans with built-in quality assurance processes;
• Running daily scrums and bi-weekly sprint cycles with the engineering team and tracking progress towards all tasks;
• Working with our UX researchers to design focus groups, interviews, and AB tests with users and clients that will continuously inform and validate the product-market fit of features;
• Translating insights from qualitative and quantitative research into specific feature improvements;
• Managing and tracking feature requests from research, product, operations, and business development teams in an organized way that can be prioritized for development;
• Maintaining strong project management capabilities with planning, communicating, documenting, and tracking milestones and results;
• Sharing what you’ll be learning with the broader community through blogs and participation in industry

Qualifications:

A desire to impact lives, the ability to make a long term commitment to your team and the product, and exceptional problem solving abilities are all essential prerequisites on the Arifu team. For this role, we’re also looking for someone with the following:

• 5+ years of professional experience with product management, ideally in the tech sector;
• Master’s degree preferred but not required. A technical bachelor’s degree is a
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; teamwork skills
• Working knowledge of software systems architecture and development. Technical programming skills not essential;
• Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams without formal authority
• Gantt charts and tracking sheets are your best friends;
• Qualitative research skills and familiarity with HCD;
• Quantitative research skills and ability to work with R or STATA will be advantageous but not essential;
• Fluency in English required and fluency in Swahili preferred;
• Innate curiosity, measured skepticism, and a desire to find answers to the difficult “Why’s”;
• Ability to enjoy (and survive) the chaos of a high-growth
• Demonstrated success defining and launching excellent products; Examples and at least one sample of an effective document delivered in the past

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Job description

Arifu, an early stage tech company in Nairobi, is looking to hire an ambitious Senior Manager, Financial Services to support the Business Development team in scaling Arifu to realize our bold vision of placing a smart personal learning assistant in the hands of those with the greatest need for information and opportunity globally. This is a full-time position with equity participation based at Arifu’s headquarters in Nairobi.

Responsibilities

As the Senior Manager – Financial Services, you will be responsible for the following:

• Support the Director, Financial Services to achieve revenue targets and financial inclusion objectives;
• Lead on securing new partnerships and sales contracts with clients in financial services and other verticals through proposals and grant applications;
• Conducting research to inform sector strategies, market entry, and sales activities;
• Generating new leads through networking, attending conferences and industry events;
• Identifying, securing, and nurturing partnerships with leading banks, MFIs, donors, fintechs and government to drive Financial Services regionally and globally;
• Creating powerpoint presentations, client proposals and delivering pitches at conferences and client meetings;
• Tracking team KPIs, customer pipeline movement, and company metrics;
• Generating new product feature ideas and collaborating with product teams to integrate them into the platform by listening to client needs and staying up to speed on industry trends in edtech, fintech, agritech, and other emerging areas of innovation;
• Improving internal tools and processes for the business development

Qualifications:

A desire to impact lives, the ability to make a long-term commitment to your team and the product, and exceptional problem-solving abilities are all essential prerequisites on the Arifu team. For this role, we’re also looking for someone with the following:

• Business Administration or Social Sciences degree or related field required; MBA preferred;
• 5+ years of professional work experience in sales, business development, or grant writing;
• A strong B2B experience in working with banks, mobile network operators, fintech will be an added advantage;
• Ability to build and nurture new relationships and close deals with institutional executives;
• Comfortable presenting in front of audiences and clients;
• Strong technical writing skills;
• Strong Word, Powerpoint, and Excel skills and the ability to use the Google for Business productivity suite;
• Comfortable creating and analyzing budgets;
• Detail-oriented with strong analytical skills to exercise independent judgment and decision making;
• Experience working outside the East African region will be an added advantage;
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, resource-constrained, early-stage work environment;
• Fluency in English required; fluency in Swahili and/or French is an asset;
• Experience creating marketing materials is an asset, particularly with blog writing, website development, and/or presentations;
• Ability to be live and work in Nairobi,