Product Manager at Ladder Africa

Rank: Mid-level to Senior

Reporting to: VP of Product and Engineering

Location: Remote / Hybrid

Commitment: Full-time

Salary: NGN 600,000 — 750,000 / GHS 7,000 — 10,000 / USD 800 monthly

We’re a trailblazing fintech startup building a smart wealth management powerhouse that accelerates financial freedom for all. Our solutions combine personal finance with artificial intelligence. If this is your jam, and you’re passionate, forward-thinking, biased for execution and impact, we’d love to have you.

The Product Manager

We’re looking for a high-velocity product manager to own and execute our roadmap with tactical efficiency and a craftsman’s flair. As our first PM, you will act as the vision-bearer for the product and drive our development team to deliver exciting, delightful solutions. We are looking for a passionate self-starter who is a sharp thinker and fast learner that we can rely on to deliver a world-class product that delights our users and achieves our business goals.

At Ladder, we believe in cross-functional rockstars that are adaptive and always up for a challenge. You can expect to do a little or a lot of everything that touches the product. Our ideal PM is a curious first principles thinker who is always asking questions to get to the bottom of things. You will be comfortable distilling complex concepts and wrangling order out of chaos.

You will be expected to:

       i.          Be an expert on the product, market, and competitive landscape. This includes a deep understanding of the technical aspects of each product and the underlying data used.

     ii.          Intricately understand the customer journey, identify product gaps, and develop product strategies and ideas to fill said gaps and optimize user experience

    iii.          Own the product roadmap and delivery of releases, coordinating feedback loops with stakeholders at all stages of the delivery cycle through regular demos, updates, and meetings

   iv.          Solicit ideas and feedback, gather requirements, write product specs and workflows, and coordinate cross-functionally

     v.          Own the end-to-end stream of product execution, including scoping & estimations, planning releases, developing user journeys and wireframes, outlining design and engineering deliverables

   vi.          Create and manage a feature backlog and drive roadmap planning with cross-vertical product teams

  vii.          Draft one-pagers and detailed requirements documents, drawing on customer journeys, user flow maps, and system architecture design

viii.          Write amazingly clear, inspirational, context-rich, and actionable user stories that get passionate engineers excited to write code

   ix.          Manage the product backlog and prioritize your user stories into Agile sprints

     x.          Implement and manage scalable, adaptable product management processes to allow teams to move and iterate quickly

   xi.          Collaborate closely with all teams to maintain our product-centric ethos, providing product perspective, support, and resources to develop how-tos, resolve customer issues, collect and prioritize support tickets and feature requests, and implement feature roll-outs and product-led growth initiatives on time and at a high standard

  xii.          Promote a highly collaborative, user-obsessed, data-driven culture that challenges norms with bias to action and speed; supports diversity of thoughts, experiences, and approaches to solve issues

Over time, this role evolves into:

Driving the execution of all product lifecycle processes for products, including product research, market research, competitive analysis, planning, positioning, roadmap development, requirements development, and product launch

Creating product strategy documents that describe business cases, high-level use cases, technical requirements, revenue, and ROI

Analyzing market data to develop sales strategies and define product objectives for effective marketing communications plans

Collaborating closely with engineering, production, marketing, and sales teams on the development, QA, and release of products, and balancing resources to ensure success for the entire organization

Developing product positioning and messaging that differentiates Ladder and its features across primary market segments

About you:

       i.          Familiarity with JIRA or other software project management tools

     ii.          Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex concepts and communicate with precision, concision, and clarity

    iii.          Extremely organized and can effectively manage competing priorities

   iv.          Almost obsessively detail-oriented, equally biased for speed & quality

     v.          Ability to visualize, illustrate, and clearly communicate data flows and supporting processes

   vi.          Confident competence with qualitative & quantitative data; you are hungry for trends and insights, and comfortable telling stories and forming hypotheses with data

  vii.          Previous experience working with cross-functional product development teams and managing engineering deliverables

viii.          You have a hacker’s mindset, with a get-sh*t-done mentality

   ix.          You are a resourceful optimizer who is always looking for the best way to do things

     x.          You are a restless innovator who is smart, passionate, and kind

Nice-to-haves

       i.          2+ years of solid experience in a product manager, product owner, or business analyst role at a product-led fintech organization

     ii.          Proven experience overseeing all elements of the product development lifecycle

    iii.          Completed some coursework in computer science or gone to a coding program

   iv.          Deep interest in tech-enabled solutions, personal finance, and blockchain solutions

Our ideal first PM is:

       i.          comfortable with ambiguity – able to ****push forward and create a path through uncertainty

     ii.          driven by existential urgency – you won’t do tomorrow what can be done today

    iii.          great with people – understands how to get the best of them, when to push and when to pull, how to communicate & negotiate

   iv.          usually the one in the room with great ideas – a knack for spinning genius solutions out of problems

     v.          a natural value generator – you make every space you enter better

What’s in it for you:

       i.          You’ll be one of our earliest hires, bearing a lot of ownership and responsibility in a high-value position that directly influences our business execution. This role will work directly with our CTO & CEO.

     ii.          As we grow, so do you. All roles at Ladder are structured to help our employees evolve as career rockstars. We will support you with the resources you need to succeed.

    iii.          You’re joining a rocket ship — here at Ladder, you’ll be joining a truly world-class team with tremendous growth potential. You’ll be eligible for our early employee share option plan, adding value to yourself while you synthesize value for the business and our users.

   iv.          You’ll have a blast — this is a fun, inclusive, collaborative, and kind group of people, excited about building a product that matters.

Work Hours

This role is expected to put in a total of 40 hours of quality work weekly. We work remotely and mostly async, with an expectation of online availability between 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM GMT.

We operate in small, focused teams, with no time tracking and minimal bureaucracy. Only results matter. We will provide you with the support you need to learn, grow, and be more productive.