Product Lead (Payments) at takealot.com

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

• Building the overall vision and roadmap of the Payments portfolio on all Takealot shopping platforms (web and apps).
• Participate in shaping takealot.com’s payment strategy and impacting how over 4 million South Africans pay for the things they love.
• Work cross-functionally with engineering, design, operations, and executive teams to bring about product enhancements that will improve payment-related processes.
• Define a compelling long-term product vision (3–5 years) and strategy for your product area, aligned with business goals and grounded in customer needs. Focus on elevating the end-to-end digital experience through innovation, differentiation, and the smart application of emerging technologies.
• Own and maintain an actionable product roadmap that clearly prioritizes features, enhancements, and strategic initiatives. Ensure the roadmap reflects evolving business priorities, customer feedback, and technological opportunities.
• Leverage data and experimentation to continuously improve the product. Analyze performance, test hypotheses, monitor key metrics, and use customer insights to identify and deliver impactful optimizations.
• Take responsibility for talks and negotiations with partners dealing with payment services, while getting to work with experts in the payment space to implement solutions that improve how millions pay.
• Research the best solutions in the payments market. Keep up to date with the latest trends and developments and build cases for projects that can move the business forward.
• Drive conversion rate optimisation as it relates to online payments.
• Work with business owners to understand their strategy, requirements, and priorities in order to translate their needs into projects for payments.
• Defining/tracking the metrics and data that will inform all decisions on product features and functionality.
• Analysing and understanding the project scope and core objectives through workshops with stakeholders to define business requirements.
• Eliciting low-level functional requirements and documenting these requirements such that detailed technical specifications can be compiled by Engineering.
• Collaborate with the technical lead and subject matter experts to establish the technical vision and analyse trade-offs between usability and performance needs.
• Evolve appropriate Product Management practices for a responsive, dynamic environment to foster effective execution of commitments.
• Be proactive in ensuring that the development and QA teams understand the requirements by attending backlog grooming and sprint planning sessions and initiating functional clarification sessions where needed.
• Setting timelines, driving project schedules, and leading cross-functional development teams from design through to release.
• Review the test plan and test scripts to ensure quality and coverage.
• Performing user acceptance testing.

The skills we need:

• Vision & Strategic Thinking: You’re skilled at defining a clear, ambitious product vision and translating it into a cohesive strategy across multiple teams. You know how to craft compelling narratives, strategic documents, and product requirements that align stakeholders, inform decisions, and inspire action. You are equally comfortable zooming out to shape long-term direction and diving deep into the details to ensure executional excellence.
• Product Craft & Execution: You bring extensive experience envisioning, building, and scaling customer-facing products—ideally in an online marketplace or e-commerce context. You have a proven track record of delivering impact through exceptional product thinking, strong execution, and a deep understanding of what it takes to ship and scale successful digital experiences.
• Customer-Obsessed Problem Solving: You lead with curiosity and empathy, constantly seeking to understand user needs, pain points, and behaviors. You are experienced in product discovery and know how to turn insights into meaningful, innovative solutions that solve real problems—for both customers and partners—while driving measurable business outcomes.
• Commercial and Market Acumen: You use data, user insights, and competitive intelligence to assess opportunities and make informed decisions. You understand how to balance customer value and commercial impact, and you prioritize work that drives both strategic growth and operational efficiency.
• Analytical Rigor: You are data-literate and insight-driven, with the ability to interpret both quantitative and qualitative signals. You define success metrics, design experiments, and track performance to inform decisions and continuously improve the product.
• Thoughtful Leadership: You lead with humility, curiosity, and conviction. You have experience mentoring and developing product talent, fostering a high-performing, customer-focused culture. You advocate for excellence, drive innovation, and inspire teams to do their best work.
• Solution-oriented, accountable, highly motivated, and have a robust personality.
• The ability to take initiative in ambiguous situations by identifying critical problems and driving solutions.
• Data-driven decision-making with good storytelling skills.
• Outstanding organisational and communication skills and the ability to balance multiple priorities

Qualifications & Experience:

• Minimum bachelor’s degree, preferably in engineering
• At least 7 years of product management experience, preferably in eCommerce/online retail/payments, with 2-4 years in a product leadership/strategic role
• Needed strong strategic thinking and product discovery experience — you’re not just executing, you’re setting vision and direction.
• Needed experience in discovering and leading cross-functional product initiatives.