Product Manager

About the Role

Sanlam was established as a life insurance company in South Africa but has since transformed into a diversified financial services group that operates across the African continent, India, Malaysia and selected developed markets, with listings on the Johannesburg, A2X and Namibian Securities Stock exchanges. In 2018 the Group celebrated its centenary as well as 20 years since demutualisation and listing in South Africa and Namibia. Sanlam is one of the largest internationally active insurance groups in the world with a presence in 27 countries and has the biggest non-banking financial services footprint on the African continent.

Responsibilities

• The shortlisting process will only start once the application due date has been reached. The time taken to complete this process will depend on how far you progress and the availability of managers.
• User and Market Insights: Conducting or leading research to develop a deep understanding of the needs, beliefs and willingness to pay of people you are building products for, whether internal or external users. For externally facing products, this includes staying close to market trends and the competitive landscape and combining the user needs and market perspectives to cultivate a team wide intuition about the problem and solution landscape faced by your users.
• Stakeholder Management (non-users): Engaging with internal and external stakeholders to gather feedback and align expectations. Managing stakeholder concerns and integrating their feedback into the product plan. Simplifying and consolidating communication to make it easy to engage with the team, know what the team’s focus is and how it’s progressing.
• Product Mission and Vision: Establishing why the product exists in user terms and how the world will look different when you’re successful. Ensuring a complete alignment with the company's mission, vision and strategy.
• Product Roadmap: Creating and maintaining a product roadmap that outlines the development and launch timelines. Prioritizing features and initiatives to ensure the highest chance of the greatest impact (e.g. active users, user satisfaction and commercial metrics)
• Product Requirements: Writing clear and detailed press releases and product requirements documents (PRDs). Ensuring PRDs are iterative and responsive to team needs.
• Product Metrics and KPIs: Defining success metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for the product to cover product adoption, satisfaction, commercial impact and reliability SLIs such as uptime, latency and so on. Inspiring the team to take full ownership of the performance of the product as measured through these metrics.
• Success of the product throughout the product lifecycle from ideation to sunset: Facilitating discussions to generate creative product ideas and solutions. Overseeing the entire customer experience, from UI/UX to documentation and support. Ensuring consistency and quality across all touchpoints. Planning and executing product launches. Collaborating with marketing and direct sales to ensure successful go-to-market strategies. Identifying and addressing product issues proactively. Anticipating future challenges and mitigating risks.
• Team high performance: Inspiring and motivating the product team. Fostering a culture of ownership, curiosity, and continuous learning. Ensuring the team has all the capability and capacity it needs to be successful inside the team (e.g. from data science and research to design and engineering). Leading post-mortems and sharing lessons learned across the organization. Continuously refining the product management process to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.
• Development of other product managers: Being the PM that all other PMs look up to and supporting them as they invest in their own development.
• 10+ years' experience as a product manager in a modern team context, with cloud technologies and autonomous high performing team organisational patterns
• Experience owning and managing a budget, including resource planning from storage and compute costs to cost of team development and retention
• A track record of high impact and investing in your own development
• Excellent leadership and communication skills
• Ability to collaborate effectively with various stakeholders across the organization
• You look for ways to do, instead of reasons not to. You are high agency, high ownership in everything you do. You know we own our future, only we can make it happen. If you find something that keeps us from our mission, you own it or work collaboratively with others until you find the right owner of it.
• Where some see impossible, you see a way: You have the strong conviction in our ability to innovate and bring financial services, and financial confidence to everyone across the continent. You turn obstacles into opportunity, chance into change.
• You move fast and fix things. You publish early and often, when you fail you learn and go again. You know that speed gives you the licence to fail, because you’re moving fast enough to correct course.
• You love creating more with less. Knowing that the biggest impact is born of the smallest acts, scale is built into your thinking from day 1. This is not about meeting the needs of thousands; it’s about exceeding the needs of millions. And working through small and mighty teams is way we’ll do it.
• You seek out and value different perspectives. Believing that when we change how we look at things, how things look for us also changes. Making tomorrow not just different, but better.