Product Development Manager Job Placement – Tugende
Job Title: Product Development Manager
Organisation: Tugende
Duty Station: Kampala, Uganda
About Tugende:
Tugende is a for-profit social enterprise providing asset and SME finance, leasing, insurance, and financial literacy to new customers, and consumer finance to qualified existing customers.
It was formally established in 2012 in Uganda and is a technology-enabled asset financier of income-generating assets for proven entrepreneurs, using a lease-to-own product to offer an affordable path to ownership of these assets. Tugende empowers customers unable to access formal credit, and has financed over 27,000 customers.
About the role:
Tugende is quickly expanding ownership opportunities to new assets, such as motor vehicles, refrigerators, and boat engines. Tugende is also building related services to support clients as they work to own these assets and maintain them after. The Product Development Manager will execute the company’s product development strategy by performing these key duties:
- Managing the entire product development cycle; researching opportunities, designing concepts, setting prices, testing viability, and standardizing processes to prepare products for scale.
- Maintaining open communication lines across all stakeholders, developing strategic partnerships targeted at impact and growth, and building trust with our customers and their communities.
- Supervising and developing a distributed team to achieve the company’s product diversification targets
Key duties and responsibilities:
- Execute Tugende’s product development strategy.
- Support the development of a team of 10+ people. Grow the department to meet the company’s product diversification needs.
- Conduct comprehensive cost/benefit and profit/loss analyses to channel resources towards highly viable products.
- Supervise co-current pilots across different locations and demographics, coordinating activities such as:
- Running field surveys to research new asset and service-based market opportunities across urban, peri-urban, and rural locations;
- Marketing opportunities and building pipeline of potential customers;
- Conducting affordability analysis and originating new leases;
- Overseeing product procurement and distribution;
- Monitoring repayments and maintaining a strong portfolio.
- Craft a deep understanding of customer’s needs. Develop, test, and continuously refine products to best support the customer.
- Build relationships and negotiate fair terms with partners.
- Keep all stakeholders informed of each product’s development, and document everything learned including unforeseen obstacles, the strategies pursued to overcome them, and potential future risks.
- Ensure new products ignite financial development.
Note: This job description gives a general guideline, and therefore does not include an exhaustive list of all duties and responsibilities
Qualifications, knowledge, experience, skills and qualification;
- A keen desire to build responsible products that promote financial development.
- 5+ years of experience managing teams, setting strategies, and simultaneously managing multiple projects with ambitious goals and timelines, with preference to those who’ve worked in fast-growing startups, management consulting, or investment banking.
- Strong leadership abilities such as, high integrity, accountable for their actions, deeply committed to the Tugende’s mission, supports the development of others.
- Ability to quickly analyze complicated trade-offs, weigh current actions against future results, and make strong decisions based on customer impact, market demand, economic viability, and operational feasibility.
- A deep understanding of financial metrics, such as profit and loss, return on investment, internal rate of return, effective repayment, and PAR metrics.
- Experience directly supervising remote teams in distributed locations.
- Experience building and growing profitable business opportunities.
- Comfort in low-income environments and ability to empathize with and gain trust from communities with which we work.
- Strong communication, presentation, and writing skills.
- BSc/BA in business administration, sales or relevant field.
Personal Attributes and Abilities:
- Innovation: develops new, better or significantly different ideas, methods, solutions or initiatives within your role that result in improvement of the departmental output and Tugende as a company.
- Accountability: holds self and others accountable for all work activities, research and personal actions and decisions, follows through on commitments and focuses on those activities that have the greatest impact on meeting measurable high quality results for the departmental success.
- Service excellence: knowledge of and ability to put into action customer service concepts, processes, and techniques to access internal and/or external customers’ needs and expectations and meet or exceed those needs and expectations through providing excellent service directly or indirectly.
- Planning and organizing: develops clear goals that are consistent with agreed strategies; identifies priority activities and assignments; adjusts priorities as required; allocates appropriate time and resources for completing work; foresees risks and allows for contingencies when planning; monitors and adjusts plans and actions as necessary.
- Interpersonal relationships: knowledge of and the ability to effectively interact within and across departments/units in a constructive and collaborative manner.
- Excellent oral and written communication skills: understands effective communication concepts, tools and techniques, ability to effectively transmit, explain complex technical concepts in simple, clear language appropriate to the audience, and receive, and accurately interpret ideas, information, and needs through the application of appropriate communication behaviors.
- Professionalism and maintaining the Tugende Employer Brand: maintains professionalism in all correspondence and being empathetic and personable.
- Positive attitude: maintains a mindset of “getting things done” and finding satisfaction in developing sustainable long-term solutions at all times.
- Flexible and resilient: willingness to travel, flexible in schedule and work hours, seeks direct feedback and sees every challenge as an opportunity to grow.
Benefits
Meaningful Work: Tugende’s work gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to earn a better living for themselves and their families. We are changing East Africa’s asset-finance industry by building a sustainable business that ignites financial development. Join this movement!
Great Team: Tugende has a smart, fun, and growing team of ~400 employees. We take our work seriously, but love to joke and have fun. We regularly have fully-paid, voluntary team outings, as well as fun parties for our customers. Our headquarters are in Kampala, Uganda and we are rapidly expanding in East Africa.
Hours and compensation: This position is for an ambitious, full-time employee who will take on additional responsibilities and projects as they arise. Tugende offers competitive salaries and benefits that reflect a person’s contributions to the company’s mission and growth.
How to Apply:
All candidates who wish to join Tugende in the aforementioned capacity should apply online at the link below.