Head, Products – Kifiya Financial Technologies

About the Product Office

The Product Office is Kifiya’s central organizational home for Product Managers. Led by the Head, Products, the office is responsible for product strategy, customer and partner discovery, product vision and outcomes, commercialization, product governance, and the professional development of product management across the group.

The Product Office works closely with Technical Product Managers in IFI and IDD. Product Managers own why a product should exist, its customer and business outcomes, and commercialization, while Technical Product Managers own what is built next and in what order, including backlog sequencing and technical delivery decisions.

Position Summary

The Head, Products leads Kifiya’s centralized Product Office and is accountable for:

• Enterprise product strategy and portfolio direction
• Customer and market discovery
• Product vision and measurable outcomes
• Product governance and lifecycle management
• Commercialization, pricing and packaging proposals
• Product adoption and portfolio growth
• Quality of product demand handed to IFI and IDD
• Leadership and professional development of Product Managers

The role leads all dedicated Product Managers and ensures each product area has clear product ownership and a strong working relationship with Technical Product Management and engineering.

The position does not own engineering backlogs, technical sequencing, architecture conformance, model development, infrastructure, production operations, or operational readiness.

Key Responsibilities

1. Enterprise Product Strategy & Portfolio Leadership

• Define and continuously evolve Kifiya’s enterprise product vision and portfolio strategy.
• Translate corporate strategy into multi-year portfolio priorities, roadmap intent, and measurable outcomes.
• Maintain a coherent portfolio across financial infrastructure, AI-enabled services, data and decisioning, embedded finance, and market-linkage solutions.
• Ensure every product has a named Product Manager, target market, value proposition, business case, KPIs, and lifecycle status.
• Balance investment across new products, growth, platform reuse, remediation, modernization, and retirement.
• Prepare portfolio investment and prioritization recommendations for the Group CPTO.
• Drive disciplined product lifecycle decisions from discovery through launch, scale, optimization, consolidation, and retirement.

2. Customer, Partner & Market Discovery

• Establish standards for continuous customer and partner discovery.
• Build a strong understanding of financial institutions, MSMEs, farmers, merchants, agents, capital providers, and ecosystem partners.
• Establish evidence thresholds for market opportunity, customer needs, willingness to adopt/pay, operational feasibility, and regulatory requirements.
• Monitor competitors, market structure, regulation, technology trends, and unmet customer needs.
• Ensure product decisions account for affordability, accessibility, connectivity, language, digital literacy, and underserved-market realities.
• Act as a senior product counterpart for strategic customers and partners.

3. Product Governance & Lifecycle Management

• Establish Kifiya’s product management operating system and governance standards.
• Define product lifecycle stages, decision rights, review processes, and required documentation.
• Ensure customer and executive requests are converted into qualified product intent before entering IFI or IDD backlogs.
• Lead product portfolio and lifecycle health reviews.
• Require customer, usability, pricing, operational, and risk testing before launch.
• Establish measurement plans for adoption, customer value, revenue, risk, and service performance.
• Recommend remediation, consolidation, repositioning, or retirement when products underperform or create disproportionate cost or risk.

4. Product-Technology Partnership

• Ensure each product has one dedicated Product Manager and one Technical Product Manager.
• Hold Product Managers accountable for product vision, customer engagement, business cases, commercialization, adoption, and product KPIs.
• Work with Technical Product Management to improve the quality of product demand and delivery inputs.
• Resolve product-versus-engineering issues through the defined governance process.
• Ensure applicable initiatives complete architecture and AI-by-design assessments during discovery.
• Maintain the three-part release gate:
  • Product Manager — commercial readiness
  • Technical Product Manager — technical readiness
  • Customer Support Excellence — operational readiness

5. Commercialization & Portfolio Growth

• Own portfolio commercialization strategy.
• Develop value propositions, positioning, pricing and packaging proposals, launch plans, and adoption strategies.
• Build business cases covering revenue, costs, margins, partner economics, and scalability.
• Define product success metrics such as activation, adoption, transaction volume, retention, expansion, revenue, and customer outcomes.
• Partner with Commercial and business teams on sales enablement, demonstrations, proposals, partnerships, and market entry.
• Evaluate customer-specific requests against reusable product strategy and long-term economics.
• Recommend investment, repricing, repositioning, consolidation, or exit based on evidence.

6. AI, Data & Platform Product Leadership

• Define product strategy for AI-enabled decisioning, data products, analytics, and intelligent automation.
• Identify appropriate opportunities for AI and reject AI use where simpler approaches provide better outcomes.
• Ensure AI-enabled initiatives complete the required AI-by-design assessment.
• Work with data, AI, technology, and platform leaders to convert technical capabilities into commercially viable products.
• Define product-level expectations around transparency, human oversight, fallback, monitoring, and customer outcomes.
• Treat shared platforms as products with clear users, value propositions, roadmaps, service expectations, and configuration rules.

7. Financial Product Governance & Responsible Inclusion

• Ensure financial products have clearly defined target markets and customer outcomes.
• Partner with Risk, Legal, Compliance, Security, Finance, Operations, Data Governance, and relevant Sharia authorities.
• Ensure products address applicable privacy, cybersecurity, AML/KYC, consumer protection, model-risk, data-use, auditability, and regulatory requirements.
• Monitor complaints, exclusion patterns, defaults, bias indicators, customer harm, and service failures.
• Ensure products accommodate realities such as low connectivity, assisted channels, language, literacy, accessibility, and rural delivery.
• Balance commercial growth with responsible access, fairness, customer trust, and long-term portfolio quality.

8. Product Organization & Talent

• Lead, coach, and develop all dedicated Product Managers.
• Establish product-management competency, leveling, career-path, performance, and promotion standards.
• Recruit and retain high-caliber Product Managers.
• Create a Product Management community of practice.
• Establish standards for discovery, strategy, business cases, prioritization, analytics, pricing, and commercialization.
• Build succession and development plans for critical product roles.
• Promote a culture of customer empathy, experimentation, accountability, and evidence-based decision-making.

9. Executive Leadership

• Serve as the principal product adviser to the Group CPTO and executive leadership.
• Prepare product strategy, investment papers, portfolio reviews, and executive/board updates.
• Align Business, Commercial, Finance, Risk, Legal, Compliance, Operations, IFI, and IDD around product outcomes.
• Resolve product strategy and customer-priority disputes and escalate technical or capacity matters to the appropriate authority.
• Represent Kifiya’s product strategy with strategic customers, partners, investors, regulators, and ecosystem stakeholders when required.

Key Outputs

The successful candidate will be expected to maintain:

• Enterprise product strategy and multi-year portfolio roadmap intent.
• Product portfolio register covering owners, markets, lifecycle, KPIs, risks, dependencies, and investment decisions.
• Product governance and lifecycle standards.
• Qualified opportunity portfolio supported by customer and market evidence.
• Product strategies, positioning, pricing and packaging proposals, and commercialization plans.
• Product-risk and target-market assessments.
• Launch and commercial-readiness plans.
• Monthly and quarterly portfolio performance reports.
• Product lifecycle decisions covering investment, optimization, remediation, consolidation, and retirement.
• Product Management competency framework, career path, succession plan, and development agenda.

Qualifications & Experience

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Economics, Finance, Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Science, Design, or a related discipline.
• MBA or relevant postgraduate qualification is advantageous.

Professional Experience

• Typically at least 12 years of progressive experience in product management, digital product strategy, platform businesses, financial services technology, or related fields.
• At least 5 years leading Product Managers or a product organization.
• Proven experience developing enterprise product strategy and managing multiple product lines, platforms, or markets.
• Experience taking products from discovery and zero-to-one development through commercialization, growth, optimization, and retirement.
• Experience in fintech, banking technology, financial infrastructure, payments, lending, insurance, embedded finance, or another regulated environment.
• Experience with platform, API, SaaS, data, analytics, AI-enabled, or decisioning products.
• Strong customer and partner discovery and executive relationship-management experience.
• Proven experience with pricing, packaging, business cases, product economics, launch, adoption, and portfolio management.
• Experience working across Product Management, Technical Product Management, engineering, architecture, operations, and commercial teams.
• Multi-country, multi-tenant, partner-led, or configurable product experience is strongly preferred.
• Experience in Africa or comparable emerging markets is advantageous.

Core Competencies

• Enterprise product vision
• Customer and partner empathy
• Portfolio and investment judgment
• Commercial and financial acumen
• Strong product-management craft
• Outcome-oriented leadership
• Data-informed decision-making
• Technical and platform fluency
• Responsible product judgment
• Cross-functional leadership
• Executive communication and influence
• Talent development and people leadership
• Governance without unnecessary bureaucracy
• Decision-making courage and integrity
• Learning agility
• Strong operational discipline

How to Apply

Qualified candidates should apply by sending their application/CV to:

📧 hr@kifiya.com

Application deadline: Not specified in the provided vacancy.