Product Manager

Position Overview

We’re on a transformation journey to be an innovative company at forefront of the financial services industry's digital transformation. By harnessing technologies, we aim to redefine the financial landscape with intelligent, advice-led solutions. To do this, we aim to be a net producer of technology, rather than a net consumer and Product Managers are a critical part of this mission. At Sanlam, Product Managers are technology leaders, user advocates, strategists and high performing team leaders. Shreyas Doshi puts it best when he said “Good PMs consistently deliver quality products and results. Great PMs consistently and singularly improve the company’s trajectory through the products they work on.” They work to ensures we’re continuously innovating and improving meeting the meets the needs of users and the business but that we’re continuously innovation and improvement within the company.

What you'll own

• 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.

Qualification and Experience

• 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

What you’ll achieve in the first 12 months

1. Achieve a free flow of information between internal users and your team(s): Identify and Conduct internal user research to understand data consumers’ needs and willingness to pay, improving satisfaction and adoption metrics. Success measured by increased user satisfaction scores and adoption rates.
2. Establish a compelling product vision: Ensure you and your team are always able to articulate how the world for your users will be different, because of your products. Be clear about how they and Sanlam will benefit as a group, relating it to your user research. Success will be measured through internal surveys and formal approvals of the team’s OKRs by users and senior leadership.
3. Establish, gain funding for and deliver an ambitious transformative roadmap: Establish a comprehensive roadmap for your products and gain the buy in of commercial and data science & analytics leaders across the business. Lead budgeting approval discussion to release investment in data to meet business needs, ensuring effective allocation of all approved engineering and financial resources. Success measured by roadmap approval and budget accuracy.
4. Give your team the context and clarity they need to deliver the roadmap: Write detailed PRDs that clarify ‘the what’ for development teams effectively, ensuring timely and accurate product & feature delivery based on group needs. Provide any additional context the team needs around user stories, commercial objectives, and so on, so they’re also clear about ‘the why’. Success measured by on-time delivery and alignment with PRD specifications along with team engagement surveys.
5. Define and measure team success openly: Define or refine success metrics and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for your part of the platform to cover adoption, satisfaction, cost as well and reliability Service Level Indicators (SLIs) such as accuracy, recency, latency and so on. Inspire your entire team to take full ownership of their performance as measured through these metrics. Success is measured by continuous improvement in team metric performance as well as unanimous approval of their definitions.

How you'll think

• 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.

Required Behavioural Competencies

6 Leadership Principles:

1. Ownership Mindset – Looking for ways to do, instead of reasons not to. Being accountable for actions and decisions, owning both successes and mistakes, and learning and growing from each experience.
2. Growth Mindset – Always learning and improving, getting better each time. Embracing challenges and failures as opportunities for growth.
3. Customer Centricity – A deep understanding of the customer seen in everything you do. Being led by customers, their feedback and their behaviours.
4. Innovation (Jugaad) – Where some see impossible, seeing a way. Doing more with less, applying creativity to turn obstacles into opportunities, chance into change.
5. Velocity – Moving fast and fixing things. Working iteratively to deliver customer value without sacrificing long-term value for short-term results.
6. Inclusion – Seeking out and valuing 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.

Build a successful career with us

We’re all about building strong, lasting relationships with our employees. We know that you have hopes for your future – your career, your personal development and of achieving great things. We pride ourselves in helping our employees to realise their worth. Through its five business clusters – Sanlam Fintech, Sanlam Life and Savings, Sanlam Investment Group, Sanlam Allianz, Santam, as well as MiWay and the Group Office – the group provides many opportunities for growth and development.

Turnaround time

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.

Our commitment to transformation