Product Lead

We're building the most powerful growth engine for African startups and their founders.
Founders Factory Africa (FFA) is unlike any place else you’ve ever worked. We are venture builders dedicated to solving some of Africa’s biggest challenges and capitalizing on it’s incredible potential by leveraging market and tech opportunities. Over the next five years, we’ll build 40 businesses from scratch and scale 100 existing growth-stage ventures through our venture development programs. Backed by leading corporates, such as Standard Bank – the continent’s largest bank – we have access to their vast resources, infrastructure, and expertise and will bring those to bear for all our ventures and entrepreneurs. Starting with FinTech and HealthTech, FFA will expand our focus as we grow, adding other sectors that include retail, transportation, energy, and education.

Our Culture

Our goals are audacious, and we want to work with people who share our passion for pursuing transformation at scale. We believe that good ideas can come from anywhere - not just the top - and we love to build our way out of uncertainty. At FFA, you will work with and meet outstanding and diverse talent from across the continent and help us build a collaborative, inclusive, and supportive network. You will work faster (and learn faster) than you ever have before.
With offices in Johannesburg and London, we are building an ambitious, talented, and passionate team, ensuring that Founders Factory Africa is the continent’s best partner for founders.

The Role

We are looking for a Product Lead to join our team and support our ventures. At FFA,Product Leads ensure that we are providing our entrepreneurs with the support they need to optimize their processes and build the best products & services possible. This means acting as both a strategic coach and facilitator  as well as a collaborator,  executing alongside founders, startup teams and FFA internal teams to unlock insights and drive momentum. The Product Lead brings FFA’s process, principles, and resources to bear, setting our ventures up for success by helping them build the right things the right way.
Success in this role requires an ability to facilitate Design thinking and Lean startup workshops as you coach entrepreneurs through product tools and frameworks, identify strategic business risks as well as execute experiments to remove them.
This role is located remote around CAT timezone with monthly travel to our Johannesburg office.

Responsibilities

• Act as the team lead with assigned portfolio ventures, identifying needs and guiding entrepreneurs and the FFA team to to develop the best products possible in an iterative and agile manner
• Build productive, collaborative relationships with founders
• Act as a product coach, raising founders’ product thinking, resilience and customer empathy by leveraging expertise in product development best practices
• Onboard founders to FFA’s product development processes
• Continuously monitor product performance - balancing business goals with customer needs - with an experimentation mindset, coordinate between  Growth Leads, Product Designers and Engineers
• Facilitate workshops and lead work sessions with both ventures and internal FFA teams, including hypothesis development, story mapping, user journeys, retros, etc.
• Develop and lead user research activities, including interviews, UAT, surveys, etc.
• Support teams in turning insights into action, including creation of user stories, and initial backlog development
• Ensure alignment on ways of working between FFA’s internal team and ventures, monitoring and working to improve cadence, objective, and team dynamics
• Own FFA’s product-related OKRs on given programs, identifying, tracking and reporting on key performance metrics
• Help develop product capability as a discipline at FFA working with leadership to define approach and build FFA’s repository of product-related resources, including relevant templates, tools, thought leadership, etc
• Define and ensure execution of FFA’s product processes and monitor adherence across portfolio
• Support FFA’s talent team to assist our ventures with hiring the right product talent.

You are:

• A proven product leader with over 5 years experience working with interdisciplinary teams to deliver digital products that users love
• Human-centered and empathetic in your approach, employing tools, techniques, and processes that put users and customers at the center of the products you develop
• Familiar with product management process and philosophies (agile, scrum, etc.) and experienced in coaching teams and individuals in adopting them
• Able to prioritise across multiple concurrent projects and ensure clarity for the team on what’s important and what’s not
• Experienced leading teams, ensuring the product vision and goals are understood and shaping the approach taken to achieve them
• Able to motivate teams, bringing out the best in them to collaborate on innovative approaches to solving complex problems
• Experienced in working with others to set ambitious goals and taking responsibility to meet them, while knowing when to seek support
• Comfortable with the ambiguity that comes from working in a fast-paced environment and adaptable to changing market needs

Benefits

• Growth: Work with and meet exceptional talent. and learn faster than you ever have before.
• Variety: Opportunity to work on hundreds of different products across a variety of sectors
• Health and Wellness: Comprehensive extended health care coverage
• Network: Founders Factory Africa is part of the strongest global network for startup founders. Our relationships with corporate executives, established entrepreneurs, and funders are unparalleled.

Founders Factory Africa provides a rare opportunity to join a team of world-class thinkers, entrepreneurs, and creators. We provide the freedom and excitement of early-stage startups but the stability and resources of a large organisation. Founders Factory Africa has global ambitions, and you’ll play a key role in our future success. 
This role is a once in a lifetime opportunity to join a high-growth organization as part of the founding team and to help shape the future of Africa’s startup ecosystem.