Product Owner: Payments

More about this Ozow fantastic position

As a Product Owner: Payments at Ozow, you will be the voice of the customer to the development team. You are an essential member of the agile scrum team, by providing the vision, information and roadmap so that we can deliver a highly sustainable product at first pass. 

You are an ideal candidate if you have:

• An appropriate degree or equivalent qualification.
• Knowledge of the product lifecycle, with at 3 to 5 years of product experience in a digital or payments environment .
• Demonstrated project management ability for a single product or a set of products. 

Your roles and responsibilities:

Manage the product/proposition design and timely development throughout the organisation's teams.  

• Gather requirements from internal and external stakeholders and be able to quantify and communicate business value, risks, and trade-offs. 
• Effective prioritisation of work for the technical teams, based business value and technical considerations (improvements, speed, risk).

Drive product/ proposition objectives with supporting initiatives 

• Have a clear understanding of the underlying business value of objectives and contribute to providing to initiatives working towards the goal. 
• Work across internal functions to ensure alignment in goals and ensure that dependencies are known, and work is followed through. 
• Understand the product proposition in the market, on maintaining and improving the proposition.  

Assist in marketing and sales requirements for branding, communication and sales to achieve and maintain product objectives. 

• Work closely with Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing to communicate the product proposition, information on new features, and increase market awareness of the product.  

Assist with product strategy development, commercial activity, and business case development approval for new initiatives

• Work with the decision makers to map out the strategy for the product based on facts and initiatives. 
• Build out business cases for initiatives and drive approval or rejection of these cases. 
• Understand the trade-offs and value in technical initiatives, market awareness, new features, solving existing problems, and aid decision making in providing comparative analysis. 
• As the product expert, assist in decision making on where money will be best-spent, and ensure that maximum value is derived from these initiatives.  

Develop in-depth knowledge of competitive products, their strengths and weaknesses, global and local product/proposition best practices and current product/proposition consumer trends

• Understand the scope and breadth of competitor products, in functionality, proposition, and target market. 
• Research best practice and leading company offerings and understand where we can improve/copy/innovate. 
• Track consumer trends and usage of the product and use this information to contribute to theproduct roadmap, in order to fill customer needs and solve pain-points.  
   

Help with product/proposition research initiatives. 

• Work with the R&D team to proof new concepts and novel ideas.Help build out a compelling business case of future value and help in the transition process of research work into commercialisation.  
   

Help with stakeholder management internally and externally 

• Over-communicate and manage expectations on progress on initiatives. 
• Assist in the communication and support of merchants and customers, keeping stakeholders up to date with progress.  
   

Establish and manage product/proposition performance metrics 

• Define product metrics clearly and maintain these metrics with relation to the proposition and target customer base. 
• Measure and evaluate product performance, provide reasoning behind the current state of metrics. 
• Establish a baseline of current product performance and track the performance of initiatives against these metrics.  
   

Manage activities to meet the financial targets of the products and services that have P&L objectives 

• Understand the costs and benefits of the product and new initiatives.Work closely with the Sales and Customer Success teams to ensure that P&L targets are met. 
• Understand the objectives and targets of functional divisions and assist the enablement of these targets.  
   

Work closely with an agile development team and R&D to deliver on initiatives

• Be the glue between functional silos – translate functional requirements into technical requirements and be able to track and communicate progress on work. 
• Always be available to the technical team to answer questions and make decisions on development decisions. 
• A good understanding of what agile truly mean, with the application of lean practices. 
• Work closely with the Agile Coach in order to improve the development process and integrate tightly into the development team. 

Your skills and competencies:

• Strong functional product knowledge – understand the product inside and out. 
• Strong leadership skills and the ability to lead a team – influence and lead without necessarily managing the team. 
• Someone who is well organised and has a proven track record in end-to-end product development and product maintenance – from ideation to production, enhancing the product features set through every iteration. 
• A thorough understanding of the payments industry and digital products.Know how to deliver, maintain, and measure effective digital products. 
• Attention to detail, leaving nothing out in analysis and delivery. 
• The ability to translate between functional requirements and technical requirements. Map functional requirements into technical work items, understand the trade-offs between the delivery of technical improvements, technical debt, and functionality. 
• Be able to build relationships easily with both internal and external stakeholders.Build strong relationships between the different internal departments, and external stakeholders (merchants, payers). 
• Goal-oriented and performance driven – drive the delivery forward of projects towards the business goals. 
• Customer service orientation – be sensitive to the requirements and needs of internal stakeholders, as well as our customers and be able to balance these requirements.Manage relationships in a proactive manner and build strong relationships with our customers. 
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written.Communicate decisions and rationalise debates with conclusive data.Communicate progress on the delivery of single features.Work with the Customer Success team to craft messaging and communicate to our merchants and payers.Communicate business value clearly in order to prioritize effectively. 
• Assertiveness – the ability to say no, while backing up decisions with sound data. 

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 one-way video interview, to better understand your skillset.
• Step Three: There will be a second interview with members of our Product team, who will work closely with you in this role.
• Step Four: Our CEO and Chief People Officer will meet with you face-to-face before finalising the hiring process.

Location of the position:

• This position is based in Cape Town, or Johannesburg.