An exciting opportunity exists for a Business Product Owner for the International Business Unit within Kazang – Micro Merchant Division, in Century City, Cape Town.

If you are passionate about agile, innovation and business growth, this is a good opportunity for you to grow. This role has significant relationships and responsibilities outside the local team, including working with Product Management, Customers, Business Owners, and other stakeholders.

Kazang offers a wide variety of fintech-enabled products, payment solutions and value-added services to consumers and merchants in Sub-Saharan Africa. This role will be part of our consumer division which is focused on providing banking, lending and insurance solutions to lower-income, underserved customer segments.

The ‘Business Product Owner – International’ has a primary objective of managing and maximizing the value of consumer-facing products and features within the business, while driving innovation and ensuring end-consumers are at the forefront of the process.

This position is responsible for taking a leading role in driving innovation for our consumer-facing products. In addition, the ‘Business Product Owner – International’ will define requirements in the form of well-defined user stories, prioritizing user stories and estimating clear timelines for the product pipeline. You will liaise extensively with the business stakeholders and executives to ensure business requirements are effectively mapped to definable products while working closely with the Technical Product Owner and Development Teams to manage the implementation efficiently. Together with the Technical Product Owner (TPO), the BPO has ownership of the squad, and what it develops.

Key Responsibilities:

• Take the lead of a scrum squad as the Business Product Owner.
• Provide vision and direction to the product squad and stakeholders throughout the project and facilitate the creation of user stories.
• Ensure that the squad always has an adequate amount of prior prepared tasks to work on.
• Plan and prioritize product feature backlog and development for the product.
• Assist your lead Business stakeholder with business processes and administration.
• Define product vision, road map and growth opportunities.
• Assess value, develop cases, and prioritize stories, epics and themes to ensure work focuses on those with maximum value that are aligned with product strategy.
• Provide backlog management, iteration planning, and elaboration of the user stories.
• Work closely with stakeholders to create and maintain a product backlog according to business value or ROI.
• Keep abreast with Agile/Scrum best practices and new trends.

 Desired Experience and Qualifications:

• Any related tertiary qualification.
• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) certification / Product Owner certification.
• Understand the software development ecosystem; have basic knowledge of core web technologies and be able to predict the time expectancy of job completion.
• Be able to manage company and developer expectations through honest and timely updates.
• Previous working experience as a Product Owner or similar.
• Experience in Squad practices will be an added advantage.

Behavioural Competencies Required:

• In-depth knowledge of Agile processes and principles.
• Outstanding communication, presentation and leadership skills.
• Excellent organizational and time management skills.
• Sharp analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Creative thinker with a vision.
• Attention to detail.
• Good communication skills.
• Good negotiation skills.
• A keen interest in understanding our business.
• The ability to build collaborative relationships.
• Be proactive, initiate action and be results orientated.