Senior Product Owner

SENIOR PRODUCT OWNER

JOB DESCRIPTION

Position: Senior Product Owner
Department: Product

Reports to: Head of Product
Location: Westlands Nairobi

Direct Reports: Junior Product Owner Product Owner
Job Type: Permanent

About the Role

Emalify is Roamtechs B2B communications platform (CPaaS) serving businesses across East Africa with omnichannel messaging and engagement tools. The platform enables enterprises to reach their customers through email SMS USSD voice WhatsApp and surveysall via a unified interface and API. Launched in 2019 Emalify now serves major banks retailers and online merchants across Kenya competing against global players and regional providers.

You will own product outcomes for Emalify Roamtechs communications platform. This means youre accountable for solving real customer problems in ways that work for the businessnot just shipping features on schedule.

Youll lead continuous product discovery to identify the right problems to solve validate solutions before committing engineering resources and measure success by business impact rather than delivery velocity.

This is not a project management role. Youll work with an empowered engineering team not direct them. Youre expected to bring deep knowledge of customers the market and the business to inform what gets built.

Key Responsibilities

Product Outcomes

• Define and deliver against quarterly business outcomes (e.g. reduce churn by X% increase ARPU by Y%) rather than feature lists
  

• Accountable for Emalifys contribution to Roamtechs strategic objectives
  

• Make hard prioritization calls based on impact not stakeholder volume
  

Continuous Discovery

• Maintain weekly customer/user contactyou cannot delegate understanding your customers
  

• Run rapid experiments and prototypes to validate (or kill) ideas before they hit the backlog
  

• Partner with design and engineering to explore solution space before committing to build
  

• Continuously develop PRDs for validated opportunities building a pipeline of ready candidates for quarterly roadmap planning
  

Product Strategy

• Define and communicate Emalifys product vision and how it connects to Roamtechs portfolio strategy
  

• Own competitive and market intelligence for the communications/CPaaS space in East Africa
  

• Identify new opportunities through market analysis not just react to feature requests
  

Team Collaboration

• Partner with the Engineering Lead as co-leaders of your product team
  

• Maintain continuous communication and partnership with the Engineering team members while negotiating Sprint capacity in order to balance between Product and Engineering needs
  

• Work with Design to ensure solutions are usable and desirable
  

• Shield the team from distraction while keeping them connected to customer reality
  

Stakeholder Management

• Translate business needs into product strategy without becoming an order-taker
  

• Communicate roadmap as a strategy document not a promise of features by dates
  

• Say "no" with data and rationale when requests dont align with outcomes
  

Key Performance Indicators

Product Value & Impact (Primary)

• ROI on Product Initiatives: Measured business impact vs. investment for shipped work
  

• Feature Adoption: % of target users actively using new capabilities within 90 days
  

• Churn Reduction / Retention Improvement: Measurable uplift attributable to product changes
  

• Revenue Impact: Contribution to ARPU new revenue streams or cost reduction
  

Discovery & Validation

• Discovery Velocity: Number of customer problems validated or invalidated per quarter
  

• Experiment Completion Rate: % of planned experiments/prototypes executed before full build
  

• Customer Contact: Minimum weekly direct customer/user interactions maintained
  

Delivery & Execution

• Outcome and Roadmap Delivery Rate: % of quarterly outcome targets achieved and % of the roadmap items delivered
  

• Time-to-Learning: Average time from hypothesis to validated insight
  

• Release Quality: Post-release defect rate and rollback frequency
  

Stakeholder & Team Leadership

• Stakeholder Alignment: Quarterly satisfaction rating from commercial engineering and executive peers
  

• Team Clarity: Engineering teams self-reported understanding of product direction (quarterly pulse)
  

• PO Mentorship: Development progress of junior/mid POs under guidance
  

Product Quality & Stability

• Product Uptime / Reliability: % availability against SLOs
  

• Technical Health: Trend in tech debt tickets (decreasing backlog not % allocation)
  

Requirements

Must have:

• 5 years in product roles with demonstrated ownership of business outcomes
  

• Evidence of discovery work: customer research experimentation prototype validation
  

• Experience with B2B or platform products (APIs integrations developer experience a plus)
  

• Ability to articulate product strategy and defend prioritization decisions
  

• Track record of working with engineering not just handing off specs
  

• Bachelors degree in CS or a related field
  

Strong preference:

• Experience in communications CPaaS or adjacent fintech/telecom
  

• Familiarity with East African or emerging market dynamics
  

• Exposure to pricing strategy packaging or monetization decision
  

• Experience in Design Thinking and modern product discovery frameworks
  

Nice to have:

• CSPO certification or any BA/PM-related ones.
  

• Certified Scrum Master
  

Requirements

Requirements

Must have:

• 5 years in product roles with demonstrated ownership of business outcomes
  

• Evidence of discovery work: customer research experimentation prototype validation
  

• Experience with B2B or platform products (APIs integrations developer experience a plus)
  

• Ability to articulate product strategy and defend prioritization decisions
  

• Track record of working with engineering not just handing off specs
  

• Bachelors degree in CS or a related field
  

Strong preference:

• Experience in communications CPaaS or adjacent fintech/telecom
  

• Familiarity with East African or emerging market dynamics
  

• Exposure to pricing strategy packaging or monetization decision
  

• Experience in Design Thinking and modern product discovery frameworks
  

Nice to have:

• CSPO certification or any BA/PM-related ones.
  

• Certified Scrum Master