Product Manager

More about this Ozow fantastic position

The function of the Product Manager role is to own the Product Lifecycle of an Ozow Product. To execute technical, digital, data platform strategies and roadmaps that encompass the current and future needs of the business, commercial / financial, technology and the platforms ensuring the integrity, consistency and resilience of platform features and functions across geographies. To work with a Team of Product Owners in managing the backlog of defects, gaps and design features (as well as technical debt items) ensuring availability, reliability, performance and security to appropriate levels, enabling high quality customer services and revenue growth across the Group. 

You are an ideal candidate if you have:

• An Honours degree. 
• 8+ years of experience, and a minimum experience of 3 years in the same or similar role in payments. 
• Demonstrated interpersonal skills including communication, coaching, and the ability to interact with colleagues and Merchants at all levels. 
• Excellent problem-solving skills. 
• Demonstrated success defining and launching of excellent products. 
• Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams without formal authority. 
• Transparent communication about the prioritisation and the roadmap process. 
• Been able to say “no,” but explain why in terms that stakeholders understand. 
• Been a ruthless prioritiser while also balancing the needs of customers and stakeholders. 
• Evidence-based decision-making communication. 

Your roles and responsibilities:

1. Strategy

• Implement the service strategy for payments and platform services with overall Client Segment, Client Solutions, Country service strategic objectives. Inculcate service orientation and culture within delivery functions and teams. 
• Contribute to driving out platform strategies and technology architecture and lead technology research, evaluation and build efforts in support of platform.
• Provide strategic direction to the teams by leading and guiding their output and delivery in line with the Group strategic plan by participating in strategic road maps and plans.
• Provide strategic direction of the technical, digital, data platform capability, identifying required platform capabilities, aligning to the strategic technology plans, standards and toolboxes defined by the relevant Group Engineering domain owners. 

2. Technology and architecture.

• Execute on responsibilities against the relevant service management model, standards, and processes. 
• Develop and maintain up to date conceptual, logical and physical architectures of the platform, ensuring these are refreshed and published quarterly. 
• Develop Platform Roadmap of key features and activities required for the platform based on architecture findings, design requirements and direction of business, technology and platform products 
• Deliver the features on the Platform Backlog to the right level of quality by the relevant Platform / Component / System / Feature Team resources, in collaboration with the relevant stakeholders (Technical Lead and Design / Architecture Lead).
• Monitor the delivery of platform features against the defined release plan by participating in daily stand-ups and report the status of the delivery against service demand. 
• Monitor and evaluate software engineering standards of the platform to maintain required stability, resilience and performance levels ensuring that the platform is engineered to be secure, meet service level objectives in terms of availability, reliability and performance.
• Manage the backlog of defects, gaps and design features (as well as technical debt items) ensuring availability, reliability, performance and security to appropriate levels, enabling high quality customer services across the Group. 
• Develop Service Level Agreement contracts to ensure availability, reliability and performance and ensure monitoring exists across these dimensions. Monitor alerts in the event of failure, slow-down, etc., giving visibility of the platform health and availability. 
• Contribute to engineering excellence by focusing on Agile principles, employing DEVOPS and system team constructs, gr owing competency and fungibility of capabilities (drawing on Group Engineering domains and practices). 
• Contribute to the overall success of Client Segment and Client Solutions service delivery and country service experience by making visible the specific capacity, availability and continuity (Always on) requirements for the platform based on usage/consumption and forecasts. 
• Participate in deep dives, communicate specific information security requirements and drive continuous improvement to platform stability, security and performance/responsiveness, ensuring team priorities are reflective of the country and service priorities. 
• Plan and manage the release of formal versions of a combination of features developed across the platform. Monitor progress of technical release activities by removing impediments to delivery, give input to the final go-live scope of the release, advise on go; no-go decisions by monitoring the agreed governance and technical milestones, communicating the outcome to the relevant service owners. 

3. Data 

• Review the number and severity of incidents and outages, performing trend analysis and investigating root causes. Give input to appropriate information dashboards regarding failure of service and develop plans to mitigate failures. 
• Analyse and report on the quality-of-service delivery. Pull business metrics for consumption by the team and for publishing to stakeholders.
• Recommend actions and initiatives to improve adoption of services on platform to business stakeholders and platform management teams based on the identification of trends in number and value of transactions, contributing insights to changing designs and strategies.

4. Financial Management

• Monitor budgets against expenditure and manage IT costs in line with organisational parameters. 
• Set up and build business cases as part of evaluating features and/or product changes.

5. People

• Promote awareness of trends and developments in payments, digital, cloud and platform technologies and devices by focusing on educating business users. 
• Coach the delivery teams, providing quick resolution for problems and roadblocks. 
• Coach and mentor, a team of PO’s who will be responsible for ownership of specific Products 
• Build and scale the required skills within the Product Domain in order to optimise value delivered through the Team to the organisation 
• Contribute to communication and change processes for new platform features and processes. 

6. Risk, Regulatory, Prudential and Compliance

• Collaborate with Country, Client Segment and Client Solutions service owners during incident and resolution processes, advising on Customer impact as a result of outages and contribute to communication action plans for the Group Technology and Operations Domain owners. 
• Oversee that the Group Technology and Operations Risk Management minimum standard is adhered to. Drive and champion a positive risk culture and attitude within the teams. 
• Provide input to relevant risk governance forums and escalate relevant risk issues. Establish appropriate risk oversight and governance processes and structures within the area. 

7. Your skills and competencies:

• Analytical skills. You are able to structure and process qualitative or quantitative data and draw insightful conclusions from it. You exhibits a probing mind and achieves penetrating insights. 
• Communication. You speak and write clearly and articulately without being overly verbose or talkative. You know when and how much information to communicate. You maintain this standard in all forms of written communication. Technical expertise 
• Data-driven. You have experience utilising data from across the business to drive insights and better decision making.  

• Problem solving. You are able to solve problems by analysing situations and applying critical thinking in order to resolve problem. You are able to decide on courses of action and implement the solutions developed in order to overcome problems and constraints.  
• Strategic thinking/ visioning. You are able to see and communicate the big picture in an inspiring way. You determines opportunities and threats through comprehensive analysis of current and future trends.  
• Teamwork. You reach out to peers and cooperate with supervisors to establish an overall collaborative working relationship. 

Interview process:

• Step One: Our Talent Team will carefully review your application in line with the job description. 
• Step Two: If there is a match, we will set up a 30-minute, one-way video interview.
• Step Three: We will send through an assessment for you to showcase your skills.
• Step Four: A remote second interview with our Head of Operations, who will work closely with you in this role.
• Step Five: Our CEO/Chief People Officer will meet with you face-to-face/ remotely before finalising the hiring process.

Location of the position:

• This position is based in our Cape Town office.