About the Role

Reporting to the Director of Technology solutions but with constant liaison with the Chief Programs Officer and other field teams, the Digital Product Manager will be a multi-talented individual with a strong background in scoping and rolling out of digital solutions for last mile users, customer journey, Human Centered Design, product pipelines for user-level impact, excellent organizational, communication and teamwork skills. As the Digital Product Manager, he/she will work with external providers of potential, scalable solutions that can be integrated into our poverty graduation program, scoping the market and identifying the best-fit solutions for adoption to create value, efficiency, scale and impact. Post-adoption, they will work on the goals, strategy, and delivery defining the way our program participants interact with digital solutions to achieve success in their small businesses during and beyond the program period. The position of Digital Product Manager will be based in Kitale, Kenya or Soroti, Uganda or Kigali, Rwanda, depending on the location of the successful candidate.

Key Roles and Responsibilities

• The role holder will be responsible for driving product strategies and vision to build best-in-class digital solutions for last-mile microentrepreneurs in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Evaluate, analyse, and understand the needs of the users through a variety of data sources
• Market research, validation, and whitespace analysis to identify opportunities for adopting new and scaling existing digital solutions
• Engage with external providers to identify the best-fit solutions in the market and facilitate discussions towards provider-partner relations.
• Oversee and manage lead requirements discovery, solution design, user journey, testing and adoption of digital solutions.
• Lead user research, usability studies, and use cases for digital solutions, collaborating with the product and service team ad Village Enterprise as well as external providers.
• Work with the product and service team to build digital solution roadmaps that will be incorporated into the broader program portfolio.
• Craft the short- and long-term vision, manage the product roadmap for all digital products and translate these into a concrete strategy, integrating to the technology plan and building to the overall organizational strategy.
• Partner with the product and service team to identify key capabilities needed as well as identifying potential issues in the adoption, use and scaling of digital solutions.
• Partner with cross-functional teams regularly to ensure digital solutions are up to date with program iterations and priorities
•  Work with other staff in the Technology Solutions team manages the delivery, capacity building and integration of digital solutions.

Safeguarding:

• “Safeguarding at VE is everyone’s responsibility”
• Monitor the content being stored on VE digital equipment to ensure no sexually inappropriate material is being shown to staff or program participants
• Ensure compliance with VE’s safeguarding policies and Code of Conduct in all programs, operations and practices
• Report any incident of child or adult safeguarding in program operations for appropriate action and follow up

Skills and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field
• Minimum 3-5 years experience in the management of new and existing digital products in an agile, multicultural environment
• Track record in planning, prioritization, research and implementation of digital products with impact among remote rural populations
• Strong analytical and negotiating skills
• Strong experience in usability and human-centred design approaches
• Passionate about building great digital solutions and solving user problems, particularly in the areas of capacity development and access to market and services information.
• Experience working with end users and delivering digital solutions for last-mile populations with limited access to infrastructure and limited literacy levels.

About Village Enterprise:

Our mission is to end extreme poverty in rural Africa through entrepreneurship and innovation. Village Enterprise equips and empowers first-time entrepreneurs in Africa with the resources and skills to start sustainable businesses and savings groups. With the income and savings from their businesses, these entrepreneurs lift themselves and their families out of economic hardship, build resilience, and break the cycle of poverty. Our strategy focuses on (among other 4 priorities) adopting digital technologies that will revolutionize small business development for the extremely poor in rural Africa through digital solutions developed in partnership with our program participants and technology partners. These digital solutions will include – but are not limited to – digital training, use of mobile phones for mentoring and access to information by program participants, financial inclusion, business savings, m-Agri solutions and other transformative technologies that increase scale while maintaining or further deepening our program impact. In the journey towards this cause, we are seeking to recruit a user-oriented Digital Product Manager to support our digitization journey by developing and identifying opportunities to build digital solutions that grow our program.

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