Product Owner - Self Service Channels

An exciting opportunity exists for a Product Owner to join our team based in Johannesburg or Cape Town in a hybrid capacity.

About Us

Mukuru is one of the fastest growing fintech companies in Southern Africa and operates in several jurisdictions in SADC and Europe. Our passion is to help facilitate safe, affordable and regulated financial products using a myriad of innovative technologies. We believe in leveraging technology to drive meaningful customer engagement, and we are on a mission to enhance our digital self service capabilities to ensure seamless customer interactions, personalised journeys and data-driven decision-making.

The Role

We are looking for an experienced Product Owner for our Self Service channels: to lead the strategy, execution and continuous evolution of our WhatsApp and USSD channels. You would work at the intersection of business needs, customer experience and technical innovation, driving the evolution of channels that empower our customers to engage with us digitally in order to meet their financial goals.

This role would afford you the opportunity to own and drive product strategy in a fast-paced, agile team environment while collaborating across verticals in the business. As a key part of our product delivery process, you will help to facilitate a diverse group of bright and passionate people to build and operate our enterprise level systems at the core of the business.

The main purpose of this role is to maximise the value of our self service channel capabilities while driving innovation, user experience excellence and ensuring that customers are at the forefront of the process. This specific role is responsible for the channel capability, primarily WhatsApp, that allows customers to engage with us across products, geographies and languages. The Product Owner reports directly to the Head of Product Domain: Customer.

This position is responsible for driving innovation, championing customer experience practices and ensuring seamless integration of across Mukuru’s product and service offerings. This includes translating the digital strategy into a clear and actionable product roadmap and facilitating delivery of this through an agile delivery team. Collaboration with Business Heads, external Partners, other Product Owners and Engineering teams will be critical to ensure that our channel solutions meet both customer and business needs.

What You’ll Do

• Define and drive strategy – set the vision for our self help channel landscape, aligning with Mukuru’s strategic vision, business goals, architecture and customer needs.
• Product roadmap ownership – define and manage the self help channel roadmap, ensuring it is prioritised based on business impact and managed in line with team capacity and velocity.
• Cross-functional collaboration – work closely with customer experience, products areas, business teams, customer support and other IT teams to understand and translate business needs into clear and well-defined product requirements.
• Conduct user research, analyse data and gather customer feedback to identify opportunities for product improvement and innovation.
• Analyse product needs and opportunities and translating these into solutions to ensure:
• Ease and consistency of the customer’s journey.
• Simple, maintainable systems that are fit for purpose.
• Stability, performance and scalability to meet the needs of the business.
• Flexibility to cater for innovation within the Mukuru domain/ambitions.
• Manage the product backlog – prioritise features to maximise the ROI of the product and ensure the development team has a clear understanding of user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Lead agile development teams
  
  • Participate in backlog refinement, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews and retros.
  • Work closely with team leadership around team capacity, understanding the team velocity and how this may impact commitment.
  • Create sprint goals with the team and ensure that the team understand stories and tasks in the backlog to the level required.
  • Help to manage dependencies across other teams and resolve impediments should they arise.
  • Partner management and industry engagement – partner with channel technology providers (primarily WhatsApp), ensuring best-in-class implementation and ongoing optimisations. Stay informed about the latest conversations & automated bot channel technologies, trends and best practices, particularly within the FinTech industry.
  • Data and insights – leverage analytics to monitor channel performance and optimise customer journeys, iterating based on key metrics and user feedback.

• Passion for technology and its potential to transform financial services in Africa.
• Strategic mindset: ability to align channel capabilities with broader business objectives and customer experience goals.

• 5+ years as a Business Analyst/Product Owner/Product Manager or similar role with hands-on experience in digital channel technologies (WhatsApp specific experience is a plus).
• Experience in the fintech industry.
• Experience working with Agile development methodologies and tools (preferably Scrum).

• Industry knowledge: strong understanding of the fintech industry and the unique challenges and opportunities in the African market.
• UX knowledge: strong understanding of UX principles and design.
• Technical knowledge: solid understanding of digital channel architecture, integrations and automation.
• Data driven: knowledge of data analytics and channel monitoring. Comfortable working with customer data, event data and reporting tools.

• Analytical and problem-solving skills, with a data-driven approach to decision-making.
• UX skills: practical application of UX through wireframing, design and prototyping tools.
• Communication & leadership: ability to engage and influence senior stakeholders and cross-functional teams, ensuring adoption and alignment.
• Project delivery skills: proven ability to define and execute product strategies that drive business results.

• Grade 12 or equivalent (essential).
• Related tertiary qualification (essential).
• Recognised product owner/business analysis/information systems qualification (desirable).
• Recognised CX/UX qualification (desirable).