Product Manager

**Company Overview**

Vivo Energy (VE) distributes and markets Shell and Engen branded fuels and lubricants to retail and commercial customers across 28 countries in Africa. With a network of over 4,500 service stations, VE is committed to enhancing the customer experience through innovative solutions, including digital payments and loyalty programs.

**Role Overview**

VE is committed to fully automate their Retail Operations across the next four years. The Product Manager for Site Automation will be a specialist in this field, responsible for defining and implementing the strategy to fully automate our forecourts and shops businesses. The role will aid the identification of the right partners for hardware, software and support based on the business requirements and the deployment of the chosen solution across CO and DO sites. This role is critical to ensuring the continued growth of our Retail business as well as automation being a key dependency for data, insights, operational efficiencies and CVP deployments.

This position is part of a broader initiative to enhance the Retail offer at VE, ensuring the right customer experience across payments and loyalty. As such this role requires close collaboration with local OUs, technology partners, and internal stakeholders, primarily IT organisation responsible for project management, connectivity and support.

**Reports to**: Head of Payment & Loyalty

**This is a 12-month Fixed-Term Contract with the possibility to be permanent.**

**Key Responsibilities**

**Right Global Partnerships and Vendor Management**
- VE has started an RFP to identify potential vendors. The Product manager will be responsible for ensuring the RFP is assessed correctly and recommend the right solution, or hybrid solutions to meet the business needs.
- The Product manager will need to ensure the costs are fully documented, SLAs are agreed and documented, and the contract award is endorsed by senior stakeholders and the contract board.
- Once identified the Product Manager will be responsible for managing the solution providers, ensuring commitments are met and performance and delivery is regularly monitored and documented.

**Solution and Deployment**

The Product manager will:

- Define the priority of market deployments and will work with the markets to get their buy in to the project and commit to timings.
- Ensure the right budgets are allocated in each annual cycle and report on costs.
- Oversee all hardware orders and shipping and customs to the required locations.
- Manage new Ous to site automation as well as retrofitting the chosen solution to partly automated OUs.
- Ensure “one touch” approach so DO sites are considered alongside CO to ensure the OUs are not overly disrupted and the customer experience is the same, regardless of operating platform.
- Work with natural team to ensure the solution is compliant to all legal and fiscal OU specifics and meets all architectural and security reviews.
- Manage the interactions and relationships with QSRs and other retailers who have a presence on the site footprint where needed, to enable the desired customer experience and integrations.
- Ensure the Change Impact Assessment is conducted and work with the project manager to ensure a consolidated plan around technical delivery and business readiness.
- Establish and enforce the SLAs for delivery, support and maintenance.
- Define ongoing performance monitoring frameworks, including KPI tracking for system uptime, transaction success rates, and customer experience impact.
- Support hyper-care activities post-deployment, ensuring rapid issue resolution and continuous improvement.

**Value Realisation**

The Product manager will:

- Laise with the Ous during each stage gate of the project to ensure the right resources are allocated and the right training and onboarding is given for the OU to understand the capabilities of the new system and the operational impacts.
- Ensure the OU are utilising all the available tools and data to optimise their business and gain value from the Site Automation made
- Share best practice and learnings from experience and from other Ous to drive additional value from the solution
- Align the data to the central data strategy, data lake and Power BI reporting
- Enable the deployment of strategic CVPs around payments and loyalty that need automation as a dependency.
- Implement a culture of replication and product evergreening.

**Stakeholder Management & Collaboration**
- Work closely with central and local teams, including IT, Operations, Finance, Legal and Retail, to align deployment efforts with business objectives.
- Collaborate with external partners, technology providers, including payment processors, terminals, connectivity to ensure compliance and security.
- Provide regular updates to senior management on deployment progress, challenges, and risk mitigation strategies.
- Engage with suppliers to ensure adherence to VE’s quality and performance standa