Product Manager at TalentUp Africa

Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, or related degree
• Agile/Scrum/Project Manager: 3+ years
• Direct management experience of a team of at least 4+ software professionals
• Experience organizing and leading cross-functional technical projects (clarifying requirements, resolving conflicts, defining roadmap, driving progress)
• Experience in assisting with and/or developing work plans for software teams
• Experience working in both greenfield and brownfield environments
• Experience with JIRA, Confluence, or similar project management systems
• Deep understanding of software development methodologies and common design patterns

Job Description

• We are looking for an experienced leader to join us as a Product Manager to help grow our existing engineering team and achieve our product and technology roadmaps. The ideal candidate is a well-organized leader with a track record of delivery. This is an engineering operational position that will require working alongside the business development, marketing, and executive teams to lead a team of software engineers at a growth stage company.
• The Product Manager will be required to demonstrate strong leadership skills to establish structure and improve efficiency within the development team. The Product Manager will leverage their experience to build high-quality, process and structure solutions that adhere to our company goals and guidelines. The Product Manager will provide project planning and manage the delivery of large scale, complex technical initiatives. He/She will act as a liaison between our infrastructure and software engineering teams to ensure that critical path items are well understood and prioritized, and specific tasks are well coordinated. The Product Manager will use organizational, project management, and communication skills to connect dots, provide insights and lead initiatives to on-time and on-budget completion.

Essential Functions

• Create Product Requirement Document (PRD) for new or existing solutions
• Review and recommend solutions to processes and business products
• Communicate reports about product backlogs, change management and performance to the team
• Maintain and manage the product backlogs
• Engage closely with the engineering team to help determine the best technical implementation methods as well as a reasonable implementation schedule
• Work with UI/UX designers to convert RDs into UI components that programmers can easily understand
• Conduct user and market research where required, as part of product discovery
• Responsible for Product Quality Assurance
• Research and benchmark of products built against world-class counterparts
• Establish product success targets including ROI before implementation, and lead the delta analysis after go-live
• Effectively establish project cost and schedule baselines, and create, manage, and report metrics to this baseline on a cyclical rhythm
• Own planning, standups, demos, retrospectives, and the execution of your sprints
• Ensure your systems self-report breaches and understand root cause
• Responsible for conducting various tests and quality assurance checks to verify the quality of completed projects

Critical Success Factors

• Strong interpersonal and soft skills to establish effective cross-functional working relationships to drive issue resolution and problem-solving
• Ability to thrive in a fluid environment where priorities shift week-to week and in some cases day-to-day
• Enjoy working with a team and sharing knowledge to improve processes and efficiency
• Demonstrate strong attention to detail and problem-solving ability
• Experience working in an Agile framework to deliver continuous improvement
• Experience building software from the ground up and all phases of the SDLC successfully: based on client satisfaction and software performance, stability, scalability, and extensibility
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills
• Great organization and time management capability for overseeing multiple tasks and prioritizing as needed
• Proactively recognize needs and take the initiative to share thoughts and possible solutions
• Demonstrable ability to think broadly about business, customer, and system impact