Product Lead

Role Summary 

The Product Lead translates PayAngel’s strategy, customer needs, commercial priorities and regulatory obligations into product direction and an evidence-based roadmap that delivers measurable customer and business outcomes.

The role is accountable for product strategy and the portfolio across consumer, business and platform products; the roadmap; discovery and requirements; acceptance and post-launch performance; and the Product team and its practices.

Key Duties and Responsibilities 

• Translate Group strategy, customer mission and commercial priorities into a coherent product strategy and portfolio. 

• Maintain one view of all product initiatives, with their purpose, users, intended outcomes, sponsors, dependencies and status. 

• Recommend where PayAngel should build, buy, partner, integrate, experiment or stop. 

• Lead discovery with customers, businesses, partners and internal users to establish the problem before defining the solution. 

• Own the product roadmap, recommending priorities on strategic value, customer impact, revenue, regulatory need, risk and effort, and keep it current as evidence changes. 

• Make trade-offs visible and explain why requests are accepted, deferred, tested or declined. 

• Turn validated needs into product briefs, journeys, business rules, requirements, acceptance criteria and measurable outcomes. 

• Build operational, financial, data, regulatory, security and support needs into requirements before build decisions are made. 

• Keep a decision and scope-change record for material initiatives and own functional acceptance of what is delivered. 

• Bring clear product decisions, requirements, risks and trade-offs to the Technology Delivery Council, and work with Engineering, TechOps & Assurance and Strategy & Execution to deliver them. 

• Give Urgent Track work and War Rooms rapid, proportionate product support, recording temporary decisions and follow-up work. 

• Enable low-risk experiments and local MVPs within proportionate guardrails and feed the learning into the scalable product. 

• Involve Governance Risk and Compliance team & Legal early, so regulatory, financial-crime, consumer-protection, data-protection, security and resilience requirements shape the solution rather than arrive late. 

• Make sure material product changes have clear ownership, risk assessment, control requirements and approval records. 

• Define success measures before build and track adoption, usage, revenue, service performance and customer outcomes after release. 

• Improve, scale, reposition or retire products on evidence, with launch readiness and post-launch review. 

• Lead and develop Product Managers, Product Owners, Business Analysts and other assigned roles, and set the standard for product practice. 

• Build a customer-led, commercially aware and evidence-based team culture that models PayAngel's EASI ICE values. 

Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering or a related discipline.

Experience: 7-10 years in product management within financial services, fintech or payments

Must-have competencies

• Substantial product-management experience, owning digital products from discovery through launch and optimization. 
• Experience leading a Product function, multidisciplinary product team or significant product portfolio. 
• Ability to turn strategy and customer needs into prioritised roadmaps and executable requirements.
• Sound decision-making in fast-moving environments, informed by customer research, analytics and commercial evidence.

Added advantage

• Product Management, Agile, Scrum or related certifications.
• Payments, remittance, fintech, regulated, multi-market, African or diaspora experience.
• Experience scaling an early-stage company from 1 to 100.
• B2C product experience, including products used by millions.
• A track record of launching and managing fintech products.

Skills and Abilities

• Strong analytical, strategic-thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, facilitation and stakeholder-management skills.
• Strong organisation and ability to manage competing priorities.
• Ability to lead and mentor high-performing product teams and adapt in a fast-paced environment.