Head, Products

Location: Addis Abeba

Department: Technology, Group Product and Technology Office

Reports To: Group Chief Product and Technology Officer

About Kifiya:

Kifiya is an AI-powered financial and market infrastructure company advancing inclusive economic growth across Africa. We design and deploy risk decisioning systems, intelligent financial infrastructure, and market linkage platforms that unlock credit, insurance, payments, and capital access for MSMEs and smallholder farmers. We build the AI, data, and financial infrastructure that helps financial institutions serve hard-to-finance segments at scale.

Business Unit

Description The Product Office is Kifiya's single organizational home for every dedicated Product Manager. Located within the Group Product and Technology Office and led by the Head, Products, it owns the portfolio product strategy, customer and partner discovery, product vision and outcomes, commercialization, product governance, and the professional standard and career path for product management across the group.

The Product Office translates market opportunities and customer problems into scalable product propositions across Kifiya's intelligent financial infrastructure, data and AI decisioning capabilities, platform offerings, embedded financial services, and market-linkage solutions. It ensures that products create measurable value for financial institutions, MSMEs, smallholder farmers, merchants, and ecosystem partners while using shared IFI and IDD capabilities rather than creating fragmented or one-off solutions.

The office operates through a deliberate seam with the Technical Product Managers in IFI and IDD. Dedicated Product Managers own why a product should exist, the outcome it must achieve, the customer and partner relationship, and commercialization. Technical Product Managers own what is built next and in what order, including backlog sequencing, acceptance criteria, technical dependencies, and release content. This division allows one Product Office and disciplined engineering delivery to operate as one coherent product and technology organization.

Position Summary

The Head, Products runs Kifiya's centralized Product Office and is accountable for what the group builds and why, for the commercial performance of the product portfolio, and for the quality of the demand signal handed to IFI and IDD engineering.

The role owns enterprise product strategy and portfolio roadmap intent, customer and market discovery standards, product governance and lifecycle management, product positioning, pricing and packaging proposals developed with the relevant business and commercial leaders, launch and adoption, and the product outcomes and business cases against which investment is assessed.

The Head, Products leads all dedicated Product Managers, including Lead Product Managers and bank- or product-aligned Product Managers. The role establishes clear product ownership, develops the product management profession, and ensures that every product area has one named Product Manager counterpart working across the seam with one named Technical Product Manager and one engineering backlog.

The role converts evidence into portfolio choices and investment recommendations. Final cross-lane capacity allocation, architecture exceptions, and unresolved product-versus-engineering trade-offs remain with the Group CPTO.

The role does not own sprint backlogs, engineering sequencing or estimates, technical acceptance, architecture conformance, model development or validation, infrastructure, production operations, or operational readiness. It is judged on portfolio adoption and revenue, attainment of stated product outcomes, customer and partner satisfaction, the quality of product intent measured through rework and clarification volume, and the strength of the Product Office as a professional function.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Product Strategy and Portfolio Leadership

• Define and continuously evolve Kifiya's enterprise product vision and portfolio strategy in line with corporate strategy and the direction set by the Group CPTO.
• Translate strategy into a clear multi-year portfolio thesis, annual and quarterly roadmap intent, target outcomes, and explicit choices about where Kifiya will and will not invest.
• Maintain a coherent portfolio across financial infrastructure, data and decisioning products, AI-enabled services, platform capabilities, embedded finance, and vertical or partner-facing solutions.
• Define what counts as a product, a shared platform capability, a configurable tenant variant, a partner integration, or a one-time project so that custom demand does not silently become an ungoverned product line.
• Ensure every product has a named Product Manager, a defined target market, a documented strategy and value proposition, measurable outcomes and KPIs, an approved business case, and a current lifecycle status.
• Balance investment across new-product creation, growth and scale, platform reuse, product quality, regulatory or operational remediation, modernization, and retirement.
• Prioritize opportunities using evidence on customer value, strategic fit, inclusion impact, revenue and margin potential, product risk, market timing, reuse, and feasibility assessed with IFI, IDD, and Architecture.
• Prepare transparent portfolio recommendations for the Group CPTO-led portfolio review; final engineering capacity allocation and cross-lane trade-offs remain with the Group CPTO.
• Maintain a product portfolio decision log that records investment, deferment, consolidation, and retirement decisions together with their rationale and expected outcomes.
• Drive disciplined lifecycle decisions from discovery and incubation through launch, scale, optimization, consolidation, and retirement.

Customer, Partner, and Market Discovery

• Set the standard for continuous customer and partner discovery across financial institutions, MSMEs, smallholder farmers, merchants, agents, distributors, capital providers, and ecosystem partners.
• Ensure Product Managers spend regular time with customers and with Commercial, Customer Support Excellence, Operations, field teams, and implementation teams so that product decisions reflect observed behavior and operating reality rather than only stated requests.
• Establish evidence thresholds for problem validation, target-market definition, willingness to adopt and pay, partner economics, operational feasibility, and regulatory or Sharia constraints before an opportunity advances.
• Build a current view of market structure, competitors, regulation, technology shifts, distribution constraints, and unmet customer needs across Ethiopia and Kifiya's priority African markets.
• Segment target customers and users by needs, behaviors, capabilities, economics, and risk rather than treating banks, MSMEs, farmers, merchants, or partners as homogeneous groups.
• Ensure research considers affordability, accessibility, language, digital literacy, connectivity, assisted or agent channels, and the realities of underserved and hard-to-finance segments.
• Translate customer evidence into reusable product propositions and configurable capabilities rather than accepting account-specific requests as the default solution.
• Create structured customer and partner advisory mechanisms and use their insights to challenge product strategy, roadmap intent, service design, and commercialization plans.
• Act as the senior product counterpart for strategic customers and partners while ensuring that Product Managers retain clear day-to-day ownership of their assigned relationships.
• Ensure the Product Office communicates roadmap intent and trade-offs clearly without committing engineering dates or release scope outside the approved product-technology process.

Product Governance and Lifecycle Management

• Establish and maintain Kifiya's product management operating system, including product taxonomy, lifecycle stages, governance forums, decision rights, exit criteria, artifact standards, and review cadence.
• Define the minimum evidence and documentation required for product intent briefs, opportunity assessments, business cases, target-market statements, outcome and KPI definitions, pricing proposals, launch plans, adoption reports, and retirement plans.
• Ensure no customer, business, or executive request enters an IFI or IDD backlog without a qualified product intent brief submitted through the approved intake channel.
• Set a proportionate governance approach that increases rigor for high-risk, high-investment, multi-country, or AI-enabled products without creating unnecessary bureaucracy for low-risk improvements.
• Lead regular portfolio and lifecycle health reviews that test strategic relevance, customer value, commercial performance, product risk, operating burden, technical sustainability, and continued investment logic.
• Require product testing and validation before launch, including customer usability, pricing and value comprehension, operational scenarios, distribution readiness, and foreseeable adverse outcomes.
• Ensure each product has appropriate instrumentation and a measurement plan before launch so that adoption, value, customer outcomes, revenue, risk, and service performance can be monitored.
• Trigger corrective action, repositioning, consolidation, or retirement where products underperform, duplicate shared capability, create customer harm, or impose disproportionate operational or technical cost.
• Maintain traceable product decisions, assumptions, risks, dependencies, and accepted trade-offs so that strategy does not live only in presentations or informal conversations.
• Continuously improve the product operating model using evidence from delivery rework, customer feedback, service incidents, commercial performance, and post-launch reviews.

Product-Technology Operating Seam and Delivery Partnership

• Ensure every product area has exactly one named Product Manager counterpart and one named Technical Product Manager who owns the single engineering backlog for that area.
• Hold Product Managers accountable for customer and partner engagement, product vision, target outcomes, product intent, business case, pricing and packaging proposals, commercialization, adoption, and product KPIs.
• Work with the Head, Technical Product Management and the equivalent backlog authority to improve the quality, completeness, and predictability of the product demand signal.
• When product intent exceeds available capacity, determine which customer or business outcome should be protected while the Technical Product Manager presents sequencing options and their cost; record the agreed trade-off.
• Escalate unresolved product-versus-engineering disputes jointly through the defined ladder rather than allowing either side to overrule the other's domain.
• Ensure material initiatives complete architecture and AI-by-design assessment during discovery and that resulting conditions are reflected in qualified product intent before build.
• Maintain the three-part release gate: the Product Manager confirms commercial readiness, the Technical Product Manager confirms technical readiness, and Customer Support Excellence confirms operational readiness; all are required before central DevOps deploys.
• Monitor product-side causes of clarification, scope churn, rework, and delayed readiness, and improve Product Office practices where evidence shows the demand signal is weak.
• Do not treat engineering delivery dates, technical acceptance, or operational readiness as Product Office decisions.

Commercialization, Product Economics, and Portfolio Growth

• Own the portfolio commercialization strategy, including value proposition, positioning, target segments, pricing and packaging proposals, launch approach, adoption, expansion, and product-led revenue growth.
• Develop robust business cases and product economics with Finance, Commercial, and the relevant business leaders, including revenue drivers, cost-to-serve, contribution margin, partner economics, implementation effort, and scale assumptions.
• Define success metrics appropriate to each product, including activation, adoption, active use, transaction or decision volume, time to value, retention, expansion, revenue, margin, and customer or partner outcomes.
• Ensure Product Managers remain accountable after launch for adoption, customer enablement, outcome attainment, and corrective action rather than treating feature release as the end of product ownership.
• Partner with Commercial and business teams on product positioning, sales enablement, demonstrations, proposals, partner onboarding, channel strategy, and market-entry preparation.
• Own product pricing and packaging recommendations developed with the business and Commercial; final contractual pricing, terms, and commitments follow Kifiya's delegated commercial authority.
• Evaluate customer-specific requests against reusable product strategy, platform economics, opportunity cost, and future support burden before recommending configuration, customization, partnership, or rejection.
• Monitor portfolio performance and recommend additional investment, repricing, repositioning, remediation, consolidation, or exit based on evidence rather than sunk cost or internal sponsorship.
• Develop business and product readiness plans for multi-country expansion, including target segments, configuration needs, partner model, localization, distribution, economics, and regulatory dependencies.
• Support strategic partnerships, investment reviews, and due diligence by articulating product fit, differentiation, growth potential, dependencies, and portfolio implications.

AI, Data, Decisioning, and Platform Product Leadership

• Define the product strategy and target outcomes for AI-enabled decisioning, data products, analytics, intelligent automation, and shared platform capabilities.
• Identify where AI can produce material customer, inclusion, risk, operational, or commercial value and reject AI use where a simpler or more controllable solution better serves the outcome.
• Require the AI-by-design assessment owned by the AI Solutions Architect during discovery for every initiative involving or materially affected by AI.
• Work with the CDS IDD, Chief Data Officer, Head of Data Science, Head of Data Engineering, Head of Platforms, and relevant Product Managers to convert data and AI capability into usable, governed, and commercially viable products.
• Keep ownership clear: the Product Office owns the proposition, target user, intended outcome, customer experience, commercial model, and adoption; IDD owns data, model, platform, scientific, and engineering delivery and lifecycle performance.
• Translate responsible-AI requirements into product intent, including transparency, explainability appropriate to the user, human oversight, appeal or recourse, fallback, and monitoring expectations, while leaving the standard and conformance decision with the AI Solutions Architect and independent control functions.
• Define product measures for model-enabled offerings that connect model behavior to customer and business outcomes, such as decision turnaround, approval quality, portfolio performance, human override, adoption, and complaints.
• Productize data and decisioning assets into reusable offerings with clear users, entitlements, data-use conditions, service expectations, onboarding, documentation, pricing logic, and lifecycle ownership.
• Treat shared platforms as products: publish their consumers, capability set, value proposition, roadmap intent, service expectations, and rules for configuration so that common capability is built once rather than repeatedly forked.
• Evaluate generative and agentic AI opportunities through customer value, risk, cost, controllability, data availability, and operating-model fit before they enter the portfolio.

Financial Product Governance, Risk, and Responsible Inclusion

• Ensure financial and market-infrastructure products are designed for a clearly defined target market and reflect the needs, objectives, characteristics, and foreseeable risks of intended customers and users.
• Partner with Risk, Legal, Compliance, Information Security, Data Governance, Operations, Finance, and relevant Sharia authorities to embed requirements throughout discovery, design, launch, monitoring, and change.
• Ensure credit, pricing, eligibility, limits, collections, fraud, and other product rules are agreed with the accountable risk and business owners and are expressed clearly enough to be implemented and monitored.
• Require testing of customer journeys, disclosures, pricing comprehension, operational scenarios, edge cases, and potential adverse outcomes before launch.
• Ensure applicable privacy, cybersecurity, fraud, AML/KYC, consumer protection, model risk, data-use, auditability, and Sharia requirements are reflected in product intent and launch readiness.
• Maintain product approval evidence and regulatory readiness for each market without substituting Product Office judgment for independent legal, compliance, security, risk, or Sharia sign-off.
• Monitor complaints, exclusion patterns, declines, defaults, bias indicators, customer harm, service failures, and distribution outcomes and require timely remediation where a product is not operating as intended.
• Design for the operating realities of Kifiya's markets, including low connectivity, assisted and agent channels, language and literacy needs, accessibility, rural delivery, and field operations where relevant.
• Ensure data monetization and partner use cases have a transparent value exchange, permitted-use basis, appropriate consent or authority, and safeguards proportionate to the sensitivity and impact of the data.
• Balance growth and innovation with fair customer outcomes, long-term trust, portfolio quality, and Kifiya's purpose of expanding responsible access for underserved segments.

Product Organization, Talent, and Professional Practice

• Lead, coach, and hold accountable all dedicated Product Managers across the Product Office, with clear ownership by product line, platform, partner group, and customer segment.
• Design the Product Office structure and capacity plan with the Group CPTO and HR Business Partner and identify capability gaps before they constrain the roadmap.
• Recruit, onboard, develop, and retain high-caliber Product Managers with the commercial, customer, data, and technical fluency required for Kifiya's portfolio.
• Establish product management competency, leveling, career-path, performance, succession, and promotion standards across the group.
• Set the professional standard for customer discovery, strategy writing, product judgment, business cases, prioritization, product analytics, pricing, stakeholder leadership, and commercialization.
• Create a Product Management community of practice with coaching, product critiques, strategy reviews, shared templates, case learning, and peer challenge.
• Set performance objectives around customer and business outcomes, product quality, evidence, and learning rather than feature volume or roadmap output alone.
• Build a culture of customer empathy, disciplined experimentation, intellectual honesty, commercial accountability, and constructive challenge across the Product Office.
• Ensure Product Managers use certified data, product analytics, customer evidence, and financial information to make decisions and do not create parallel sources of truth.
• Address unclear ownership, weak product craft, repeated bypassing of the operating seam, or underperformance quickly and fairly.
• Maintain succession coverage and development plans for critical Lead Product Manager and Product Manager roles.

Executive Leadership and Cross-Functional Alignment

• Serve as the principal product adviser to the Group CPTO and executive leadership on portfolio direction, customer value, product economics, market choices, commercialization, and product risk.
• Prepare clear product strategy narratives, investment papers, portfolio reviews, and executive or board updates that distinguish evidence, assumptions, choices, trade-offs, and expected outcomes.
• Align business, Commercial, Finance, Risk, Legal, Compliance, Operations, Customer Support Excellence, IFI, and IDD leaders around shared product outcomes and explicit decision rights.
• Resolve disputes within the Product Office and on product vision, target outcomes, customer priority, or commercialization; escalate capacity, architecture, technical, or service-authority conflicts to the accountable role.
• Participate actively in the weekly Portfolio Review, fortnightly CPTO Leadership forum, quarterly business review, and product-and-engineering syncs while ensuring each forum produces a decision or record.
• Maintain, with the Lead, Project Manager, a consistent view of portfolio intent, commitments, dependencies, risks, and expected outcomes without duplicating the engineering plan of record.
• Represent Kifiya's product strategy credibly with strategic customers, partners, investors, regulators, and ecosystem stakeholders when requested.
• Support capital raises, partnerships, and due diligence by explaining the portfolio, differentiation, adoption evidence, commercialization model, and scalable product architecture from a product perspective.
• Communicate decisions, constraints, and trade-offs directly and consistently so that customer commitments and internal expectations remain aligned with approved portfolio intent.

Key Outputs The role is expected to produce and maintain the following core deliverables:

• An approved enterprise product strategy and multi-year portfolio roadmap intent aligned to Kifiya's corporate and product-and-technology strategy.
• A current product portfolio register showing product owner, target market, lifecycle stage, value proposition, business case, target outcomes, KPIs, risks, dependencies, and investment decision.
• A product governance and lifecycle standard covering discovery, qualification, investment, launch, monitoring, remediation, consolidation, and retirement.
• A qualified opportunity portfolio supported by customer and market evidence, product intent briefs, business cases, and explicit prioritization recommendations.
• Clear product strategies, positioning, pricing and packaging proposals, commercialization plans, and adoption plans for the portfolio's priority products.
• Documented target-market, customer-outcome, and product-risk assessments for applicable financial, data, and AI-enabled products.
• Commercial-readiness records and launch plans coordinated with Technical Product Management and Customer Support Excellence.
• Monthly and quarterly portfolio performance reporting covering customer outcomes, adoption, usage, revenue, margin, risk, service impact, and corrective actions.
• Product lifecycle decisions and action plans for investment, optimization, remediation, consolidation, and retirement.
• A Product Management competency framework, career path, succession plan, and development agenda for all dedicated Product Managers.
• A clear, evidenced portfolio narrative for executive, board, customer, partner, investor, and due-diligence discussions.

Qualifications and Experience Education

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Economics, Finance, Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, Design, or a closely related discipline.
• A relevant postgraduate qualification, such as an MBA or master's degree in technology, innovation, finance, product management, or a related field, is advantageous but not mandatory where the candidate demonstrates equivalent experience.

Professional Experience

• Substantial progressive experience - typically at least 12 years - in product management, digital product strategy, platform businesses, financial services technology, or a closely related field.
• At least five years leading Product Managers or a product organization with accountability for multiple product lines, platforms, or markets.
• Demonstrated success defining enterprise product strategy, managing a portfolio, and making investment and lifecycle decisions across new, scaling, mature, and retiring products.
• Proven experience taking products from discovery and zero-to-one creation through commercialization, adoption, scale, optimization, and, where necessary, consolidation or retirement.
• Experience in fintech, banking technology, financial infrastructure, payments, lending, insurance, capital solutions, embedded finance, market infrastructure, or another regulated and transaction-intensive environment.
• Experience leading platform, API, SaaS, data, analytics, AI-enabled, or decisioning products and working credibly with senior engineering and data leaders.
• Strong record of customer and partner discovery and executive relationship management in B2B, B2B2C, financial-institution, platform, or ecosystem settings.
• Demonstrated experience with product commercialization, pricing and packaging, business cases, product economics, launch, adoption, and portfolio performance management.
• Experience operating a product model with clear boundaries between dedicated Product Management, Technical Product Management, engineering, architecture, operations, and commercial functions.
• Experience in product oversight, target-market definition, customer-outcome monitoring, risk and compliance collaboration, and regulated product launch.
• Experience supporting multi-country, multi-tenant, partner-led, or configurable product deployments is strongly preferred.
• Experience in Africa or comparable emerging markets, and with products serving MSMEs, smallholder farmers, low-income customers, or under-served segments, is advantageous.

Knowledge and Leadership Requirements

• Strong knowledge of product strategy, portfolio management, customer discovery, product analytics, lifecycle governance, pricing and packaging, go-to-market, and product economics.
• Sufficient technical fluency to reason about APIs, platforms, data products, AI and model-enabled products, cloud services, integration, security, resilience, and operational constraints without taking over engineering decisions.
• Strong understanding of financial-services product risk, target-market and customer-outcome principles, privacy, data governance, cybersecurity, regulatory readiness, and responsible AI.
• Ability to distinguish product outcomes from feature output and to define measures that connect customer behavior, business performance, risk, and service quality.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication, including strategy narratives, investment recommendations, executive presentations, product briefs, and difficult trade-off conversations.
• Relevant product, innovation, financial-services, analytics, or technology certifications are advantageous but are not a substitute for demonstrated product judgment, commercial results, and people leadership.

Core Competencies

• Enterprise product vision: Connects corporate strategy, market opportunity, customer needs, shared technology capability, and portfolio economics into a coherent product direction.
• Customer and partner empathy: Builds strategy from direct understanding of users, financial institutions, MSMEs, farmers, merchants, partners, and the realities of underserved markets.
• Portfolio judgment: Makes explicit investment, sequencing, consolidation, and retirement choices across competing opportunities and time horizons.
• Commercial and financial acumen: Understands pricing, packaging, unit economics, revenue, margin, partner economics, adoption, and the commercial consequences of product choices.
• Product craft: Sets a high standard for discovery, strategy, product intent, outcomes, prioritization, product analytics, launch, adoption, and lifecycle management.
• Outcome orientation: Measures success through customer and business impact rather than feature volume, activity, or presentation quality.
• Data-informed decision making: Uses customer evidence, certified metrics, experiments, financial information, and market intelligence while recognizing uncertainty and data limitations.
• Technical and platform fluency: Engages credibly on APIs, data, AI, platforms, integration, architecture, security, reliability, and delivery trade-offs without displacing accountable technical leaders.
• Responsible product judgment: Balances growth and innovation with customer outcomes, inclusion, fairness, privacy, security, regulatory obligations, and long-term trust.
• Cross-seam leadership: Works effectively with Technical Product Management and engineering while protecting clear ownership of product vision, backlog authority, technical readiness, and operational readiness.
• Executive influence and clarity: Explains complex choices, trade-offs, risks, and evidence in concise business language and aligns stakeholders without relying only on hierarchy.
• Talent and culture leadership: Builds strong Product Managers, creates clear standards and career paths, gives direct feedback, and develops succession for critical roles.
• Governance without bureaucracy: Creates the minimum effective structure, evidence, and discipline needed for consistent decisions and accountable execution.
• Decision courage and integrity: Stops weak opportunities, challenges powerful sponsors, records disagreement, and recommends exit when evidence no longer supports investment.
• Learning agility: Continuously updates product strategy and practice as customer behavior, AI, financial infrastructure, regulation, competition, and African markets evolve.
• Operational discipline: Maintains reliable portfolio records, product decisions, reviews, actions, and follow-thr