Product Manager

• Job Type Full Time , Hybrid
• Qualification BA/BSc/HND
• Experience 5 years
• Location Nairobi
• Job Field Product Management
• We are looking for a sharp, technically fluent Product Manager to bridge the gap between our customers, our advisory team, and engineering, turning real-world client needs; for both our internal products and solutions we build for customers, into products that ships.
• This isn't a role where you write specs and wait. You will dig into the technical weeds with engineers, work closely with our advisory team to understand what customers actually need, and use AI tools to move faster from insight to shipped feature. At times, you'll step into the Product Owner seat on behalf of a customer who doesn't have one; driving backlog and priorities directly for their engagement.
• You'll also get hands-on, mocking up flows in Figma and building quick proof-of-concepts to make the product vision tangible before a single line of production code is written. If you're excited about owning outcomes rather than outputs, translating messy customer requirements into clear priorities, and using AI as a genuine extension of how you work, this role is for you.
• Bridge Customer, Advisory & Engineering: Act as the connective tissue between our customers, our advisory team on the front lines, and the engineers building the solution, ensuring nothing gets lost in translation.
• Own Internal & Customer Roadmaps: Define and prioritise the product roadmap across our own internal products as well as active customer engagements, balancing strategic bets against near-term delivery commitments.
• Proxy Product Owner: Step in as the de facto Product Owner for customers who lack one, owning their backlog, prioritisation, and day-to-day product decisions on their behalf.
• Requirements Translation: Work directly with the advisory team and customers to turn technical and business requirements into clear epics, user stories, and acceptance criteria engineering can build from.
• Design & Rapid Prototyping: Mock up flows and screens in Figma, and build quick proof-of-concepts and clickable prototypes to demonstrate product vision, whether for an internal tool or a customer solution.
• Cross-functional Delivery: Partner closely with engineering to ship features end-to-end, unblocking teams and making fast, well-reasoned trade-off calls.
• Customer & Market Insight: Join customer conversations directly to identify gaps, validate solutions, and stay close to what customers actually need versus what they initially ask for.
• AI-Native Workflow: Use AI tools to accelerate research synthesis, spec writing, prototyping, and data analysis, and know where human judgment has to take over.
• Product Feedback Loop: Serve as the internal voice of the customer, feeding real field insight from the customer and advisory team back into engineering priorities, and back into how our own internal products evolve.
• Track Record: 5+ years of product management experience, ideally in enterprise B2B software or client-facing technical delivery.
• Product Owner Range: Comfortable operating as a Product Owner when needed, running backlog grooming, writing acceptance criteria, and making the calls a customer's own Product Owner would normally make.
• Design & Prototyping: Hands-on experience in Figma (or similar), able to go from idea to clickable mockup or working POC without waiting on a designer or engineer.
• Technical Fluency: Comfortable reading architecture diagrams, understanding APIs and integrations, and holding your own in a conversation with engineers; you don't need to write production code, but you need to understand what's hard and why.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Confident using data and experimentation to prioritise, validate hypotheses, and measure impact.
• AI Fluency: Genuine, daily use of AI tools in your workflow, not just familiarity, but a track record of using them to ship faster and think better, with a mindset of sharing to enable other colleagues to learn from your workflow.
• Executive Presence: Able to move seamlessly between a whiteboard session with engineers and a strategic conversation with a customer's VP or CTO.
• Ownership & Bias to Action: High autonomy and grit; you invent solutions rather than waiting for direction.
• Communication: Exceptional written and verbal skills, with a track record of building trust across technical, advisory, and customer stakeholders alike.
• Range: Comfortable switching context between shaping our own internal products and driving priorities for customer engagements.
• Experience in specialised domains relevant to our work (AI/ML products, Mobile, SaaS or other web-application technologies, distributed systems, etc.).
• Prior experience in a technical, high-touch client delivery environment: forward deployment, solutions engineering, consulting, or technical pre-sales adjacent roles.
• Formal certifications e.g. Product Owner certification (CSPO or equivalent) or hands-on Scrum/Agile ceremony experience.
• Background in financial services, payments, or FinTech, with an understanding of the sector's security and regulatory demands.