Head of Product

The **Head of Product** at SmartWage will lead our product strategy, translating customer needs into product strategy and features. You will be responsible for overseeing the product from ideation and discovery to release, distribution and beyond. Your focus will be to maximise the value of the product with our customers and the business in mind.

You will be responsible for building and leading our Product Management team. You will talk to stakeholders regularly to ensure our features solve real problems, you will devise and validate a roadmap of features and you will ensure that the resulting product is of exceptional quality. We’re passionate about building a product that provides relevant, sustainable, accessible and practical solutions to our customers.

This role will appeal to you if you are:

- An entrepreneur at heart who is excited about making an impact in people's lives
- Someone who has experience in and is energised by building and scaling new web based products from inception
- A leader that has exceptional people skills, and that cares about creating a world class Product team and culture
- Someone who wants to be hands on in a fast moving and scaling startup

**What you are going to do**:**
Product Strategy Responsibilities**
- Build a vision and strategy for our products
- Develop a roadmap of feature ideas in line with the product strategy
- Gather qualitative and quantitative user research data from key stakeholders to inform and validate features. These stakeholders include internal teams (Operations and Sales), partners (HR and payroll providers) and customers (employers and employees).
- Improve the efficiency of our current products while driving product innovation

**Product Management Responsibilities**
- Develop deep understanding of market and competitors
- Work with senior management to create product plans and roadmaps
- Lead product managers and coordinate cross-functional teams
- Recommend and develop metrics to measure impact of each feature and our products as a whole
- Communicate product strategy and updates to the rest of the SmartWage team
- Build out a team of world-class product managers

**Why you should join us**:

- We’re on a mission to drive digital inclusion across workplaces in Africa and disrupt traditional payday lending (our current offering is 10x cheaper than all other payday loan solutions on the market).
- In our first 2 years, we created a responsible and frictionless wage access product. We’ve reached product market fit and we’re now focused on building a new HR and Communications product to engage deskless workers and provide equal access to critical information and HR services.
- Currently, we operate nationally, with plans to scale across Africa to serve 10 million people by 2026.
- We were oversubscribed for our recent fundraise in 2021 which gives us a significant runway to scale our team and deploy a broader range of products.
- You’ll have the opportunity to use your expertise to shape the future of our product and drive our strategy to directly impact our success.
- What we’re doing has never been done before. You’ll have the opportunity to use your expertise to shape the future of our product and drive our strategy to directly impact our success.
- Our culture of ownership will give you unprecedented growth and learning.
- We have developed with Django (Python), with a ReactJS (Javascript) to service administrators internally and our customers, with a custom chatbot architecture (Python). Our architecture is constantly evolving and we’re always eager to introduce new technologies.

**Our commitment to you**:

- We’re a focused and ambitious team that have chosen the startup life over corporate careers
- We’re optimistic and energetic, so we like to have fun but we push hard
- We are unfailingly transparent, and we value giving and receiving feedback from one another, our clients and users
- People matter and we have a high degree of integrity
- We make data-informed decisions and we move fast
- We support flexibility and ensure that our people can work whenever and wherever (in SA) they perform at their best. Building relationships and collaboration is important to us so we do have awesome new offices in Cape Town and Johannesburg, for those who prefer being together in an office.
- Competitive pay, benefits, your choice of home office tech and 22 days of annual leave.
- An opportunity to own equity.

**Requirements**:
**Required Experience**:

- 3+ years as a Product Manager in a fast moving tech start up
- 1+ year as a Product Leader or strategic Product role in a fast moving tech start up
- Proven experience building a new product from inception to distribution
- Experience designing and conducting user research
- Experience developing metrics that measure the impact of our product
- Experience recruiting and leading other product managers

**Advantageous Experience**:

- Building enterprise products
- Building products