Who we are:

At SafeBoda, we are driving Africa forward by transforming transportation and delivery services to be safe, affordable, and reliable. Our platform is carefully designed to meet the needs of African consumers as a one-stop shop for transportation and on-demand services.

Operational in Uganda and Kenya, we are a venture-funded Series B company that is already having a huge impact on millions of people in Africa. Our backers include Google, Unbound, Argor (GoJek’s VC), AllianzX, Yamaha, and Beenext, among others. We have a passionate and highly engaged team of superstars based in East Africa. Together, we aim to revolutionise transport and logistics in Africa’s cities.

Job Summary:

The Head of Product leads product development at SafeBoda. You will work with senior management to craft the product roadmap and set product direction. You will lead a team of product managers, ensuring each vertical has a coherent strategy that is aligned with business objectives, and you will ensure that all features are fully scoped and detailed before implementation by the engineering team. You will lead on customer discovery, ensuring that we are collecting feedback in a structured and timely manner. We are looking for an entrepreneurial and passionate person to innovate and execute across a rapidly growing, fast-paced company.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead all dimensions of product development for the SafeBoda applications: visioning, long-term road mapping, daily prioritization, feature design, development, and user experience testing.
• Be the champion of the product – make the tough calls. Support the development team and hold them accountable.
• Manage and lead a growing team and work with the Head of Engineering and Senior Leadership to steer product development.
• Oversee product testing and iteration with a strong focus on user-centered design. This means understanding the customers’ needs and being the Voice of the Customer.
• Communicating with stakeholders on the product, its development, performance, and opportunities.
• Serve as a customer and business proxy to the engineering team, communicating business vision, strategy, and interests to the product and engineering teams.
• Metrics and Analytics: Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and use data-driven insights to track and measure the success of the product, making adjustments as needed.
• Budget Management: Manage the product budget, making sure resources are allocated effectively and efficiently.
• Competitive Analysis: Keep an eye on competitors and their products, identifying opportunities for differentiation and staying ahead in the market.
• Risk Management: Identify and mitigate potential risks that could impact the product’s success.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in product management, development, and design, delivering highly successful and innovative products that customers love.
• Experience crafting and delivering a product roadmap in a fast-paced environment with continually evolving business objectives and implementation constraints.
• Understand software development, agile development methodologies and how a product team can enable the engineering team to maximize output.
• Experience collecting, analyzing, and iterating using quantitative and qualitative customer data. You should love chatting with users and attaining insights to build a better product.
• Exhibit the ability to navigate ambiguity, juggle multiple tasks, think independently, and problem-solve like a boss.
• Strong undergraduate degree (or higher) with demonstrated strong academic performance

Key Competencies

Product Competency Matrix for Head of Product

Product Execution – Define, build, and launch exceptional products

• Feature Specification
• You can review specs or feature requests created by your team and give effective feedback at the appropriate level of detail for the audience, guiding your team to clearly-written requirements documents. Each spec produced by your team should be more effective than the last.
• Product Delivery
• You enable your team to take a “speed wins” approach to building and shipping features that strike the right balance between moving quickly and delivering effective functionality. You can make tough trade-off decisions that result in both a successful initial launch and quick, data-driven iteration. You can clearly connect your team’s work back to objectives the management team cares about, helping the project team to clearly understand the importance of their work.
• Product QA
• You are not only efficient at QAing a feature yourself, but can effectively rally additional support for your team (from relevant stakeholders) when a feature or release is especially complex or risky. You are effective at coaching your team to deliver high-quality features.

Customer Insight – Understand and fulfill customer needs

• Fluency with Data
• You can use insights you gather from the data to help drive roadmap planning and quarterly goal setting. You proactively think about how to present progress against those goals (e.g., building the right dashboards and reports) to a broad audience. You help to guide your team’s use of data and emphasize its role in decision-making. You can effectively translate insights into an understanding of the causal factors that drive product success.
• Voice of the customer
• You can effectively leverage user feedback to uncover unmet needs, to validate a new concept, or to improve an existing product. You are an effective example to your team for the importance of user input. You can effectively leverage user feedback to not only get feedback on individual projects, but to help inform your team’s roadmap.
• User Experience Design
• You can articulate a product vision in visual form, sketching out the basics of a new product idea. You can critically assess your team’s design work and give clear and constructive feedback to help improve its usability. You understand the value of consistent design across the company and are an advocate for effectively using design systems to make products consistent and understandable for customers.

Product Strategy – Deliver business impact via product innovation

• Business Outcome Ownership
• You are responsible for the outcomes driven by your team, and are effective at making adjustments to direction or process to maximize those team outcomes. You can identify when your team is hitting diminishing returns and recommend where to shift that investment. You are consistently able to set and achieve meaningful OKR’s for yourself and your team.
• Product Vision and Roadmapping
• You are able to consolidate similar themes into an investment thesis that resonates at the company level; you can guide more junior team members in their work. You can identify and describe new opportunities that help to further those goals and work with peers to translate that into a coherent roadmap. You connect your product vision and feature roadmap to the company strategy.
• Strategic Impact
• You understand how to tie your team’s efforts to the company strategy and can make product roadmap recommendations based on those factors in order to maximize team outcomes.

Influencing People

• Stakeholder Management
• You help members of your team identify and manage project stakeholders. You use good judgment to find the right balance of stakeholder needs: either incorporating feedback when appropriate or effectively advocating for what you’ve determined to be the best direction for the product and the company. You take steps to proactively learn about stakeholder needs and are generally aware of other teams’ product plans, and how they might interact with those of your team.
• Team Leadership
• You are responsible for helping members of your team identify areas of strength and opportunity, and work with them to find ways to build their skills and improve against the relevant product competencies. You are a proactive manager of your team’s careers at the company, and are continuously looking for opportunities to help them improve and develop into product leaders.
• Managing Up
• You are able to effectively influence strategic decisions with senior managers within and outside the product org. You are able to influence prioritization and resourcing decisions to give your initiatives the support they need. Your team’s progress and outcomes have VP-level visibility and support.

Benefits

• A supportive team environment with mentorship from SafeBoda leadership
• Be a critical part of a team at the pinnacle of tech entrepreneurship in Africa
• Competitive salary
• Health insurance
• SafeBoda Wallet credits for transport

Company Values

• Community: Community drives us. We treat every driver, staff member, and customer with respect, knowing that together, we are stronger.
• Safety: We stand for safety. We protect our drivers and passengers
• Innovation: We challenge the status quo and create smart, practical solutions that make everyday life simpler and safer
• Transparency: We are open-minded and candid, openly sharing our opinions without fear of judgment. We actively seek feedback on our product and performance to continuously improve.
• Integrity: We earn trust by staying true to our values, holding ourselves to the highest standards, and delivering on our promises.
• Collective Commitment: Everyone is encouraged to disagree while a decision is being made. However, once a decision has been made, everybody must commit to it. “I agree, and I commit, I disagree

• Lead all dimensions of product development for the SafeBoda applications: visioning, long-term road mapping, daily prioritization, feature design, development, and user experience testing.
• Be the champion of the product – make the tough calls. Support the development team and hold them accountable.
• Manage and lead a growing team and work with the Head of Engineering and Senior Leadership to steer product development.
• Oversee product testing and iteration with a strong focus on user-centered design. This means understanding the customers’ needs and being the Voice of the Customer.
• Communicating with stakeholders on the product, its development, performance, and opportunities.
• Serve as a customer and business proxy to the engineering team, communicating business vision, strategy, and interests to the product and engineering teams.
• Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and use data-driven insights to track and measure the success of the product, making adjustments as needed.
• Manage the product budget, making sure resources are allocated effectively and efficiently.
• Keep an eye on competitors and their products, identifying opportunities for differentiation and staying ahead in the market.
• Identify and mitigate potential risks that could impact the product’s success.

• Product management
• Product development
• Product design
• Product roadmap creation
• Agile development methodologies
• Customer data analysis (quantitative and qualitative)
• User feedback collection and analysis
• Problem-solving
• Stakeholder management
• Team leadership
• Budget management
• Competitive analysis
• Risk management
• User-centered design
• Data analysis and interpretation
• User experience design

• 8+ years of experience in product management, development, and design, delivering highly successful and innovative products that customers love.
• Experience crafting and delivering a product roadmap in a fast-paced environment with continually evolving business objectives and implementation constraints.
• Understand software development, agile development methodologies and how a product team can enable the engineering team to maximize output.
• Experience collecting, analyzing, and iterating using quantitative and qualitative customer data.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, juggle multiple tasks, think independently, and problem-solve.
• Strong undergraduate degree (or higher) with demonstrated strong academic performance.