Product Researcher at Okra Solar

Responsibilities

This role exists to be the voice of the customer inside the product team — grounded in real field/customer experience. You’ll spend time with developers, technicians, and end-users, translate feedback into insights, and help the product team build things that actually work in the Nigerian context.

• Understand the whole product deeply (hardware and software)
• Get early prototypes (software and hardware) into end-user hands for feedback, observation of real-world usage, testing assumptions, and identifying risks early
• Need to be comfortable handling hardware prototypes. not just software!
• Quickly learn from a user’s confusion, misuse, or even silence, and capture those insights
• Plan and conduct interviews, shadowing, field-testing, etc.. Join customer-facing meetings or trainings to observe and build intuition for customer needs and pains.
• Translate feedback and field notes into distilled insights and recommendations with the rest of the Product team
• Collaborate closely with the product team to ultimately influence key roadmap and design decisions
• Field time - spend time in customer offices, field offices, warehouses, and villages to engage with the end-to-end journey from sales to installation to ongoing usage and maintenance.

Required Skills

We are looking for someone who has skills in some, if not all of these areas:

• 3+ years in customer-facing roles that also required field work, interviewing, product research, or something similar
• Experience working in or around energy, infrastructure, mobility, fintech, or hardware-heavy products in a rural context. Familiarity with Nigeria market constraints.
• Intuition for UX - thinks about customer journeys, painpoints, identifies friction or confusion
• Product mindset - asks “why”, doesn’t just listen to what customers say they want on the surface
• Patient, observant, and curious - you’re not trying to sell or convince someone of your perspectives, you’re trying to learn and understand the customer needs
• Diligent in communicating and documenting findings