Product Manager at IoT.nxt

About the job

Job Purpose

The purpose of this job is to develop and manage IoT products by taking them through the entire product life-cycle including opportunity assessment, requirements definition, pricing, competitive analysis, development, launch, and maintenance. This includes active collaboration with various other departments (marketing, technical specialists, R&D, IT, etc.) to bring smart concepts into production, and support of sales on product related matters.. This position includes carrying of commercial responsibility for the products under management of the product manager.

Responsibilities includes the following:

New Product Development

• Define product strategy and roadmap
• Conduct feasibility study and business case
• Define market and product requirements with prioritized features and corresponding justification
• Drive results of product launch
• Use design thinking tools including personas, empathy maps, journey maps and story maps to communicate customer needs.
• Work with internal teams to develop, launch, and maintain products
• Develop core positioning, value proposition, key message, and specification of a product
• Set pricing, analyze profitability, optimize cost
• Working with support to design relevant offerings.
• Developing and end of life policy.
• Managing legal compliance.
• Forecast revenue, set cost budget, and plan resources to support revenue target

Product Management

• Measurement of product performance against business plan.
• Migration of customers from old to new products
• Support the sales team with regards to training of the product.
• Competitive (local and global) benchmarking.
• Identification of new revenue / new product opportunities.
• Analyze product value chains.

Pricing and Sales Support

• Management and evaluation of product revenue targets
• Technical Pre-sales
• Participation in product demos

Research and Marketing

• Direct, Wholesale and Resale Product Strategy (All channels).
• Execute the ’go-to-market’ strategy for each product and market.
• Propose and implement special promotional campaigns on targeted products
• Ensure that all marketing co-lateral is maintained for each product to assist in the marketing and sale of the product line
• Ensure that all product documentation is continuously updated
• Propose Sales targets for the sale of each product area – for acceptance by management, and as a base for the sales budget
• Continuously assess customer satisfaction of the full product portfolio
• Competitive analysis per product set
• Management and execution of product business plans
• Market Research

Information Sharing and Reporting

• Consolidate key information and translate this into meaningful intelligence for submission to Senior Management
• Report on performance of products in the field
• Reporting progress against initiatives/tasks

Customer Relations

• Liaise with the various customers on their products and services support requirements
• Resolve complaints and escalate queries with regards
• Provide input on request from other Mitigate functional areas
• Align service delivery to changing environment.
• Understand customer needs and develop and fine-tune systems accordingly
• Ensure customer needs and requirements are satisfied through appropriate systems / processes / procedures Put contingency plans in place to prevent delays and enhance the customer experience.
• Adopt a proactive approach to prevent problems from arising in the future
• Drive continuous improvement as an important element of service delivery

Education

• Matric and/or equivalent is a MUST
• B.Sc/BCom or equivalent experience
• Masters in Business Administration(MBA) advantageous

Experience

• Minimum 5 years product management or development;
• IoT, IT, electronics Industry experience will be highly advantageous;
• Commercial experience;
• Technology sales experience;
• Pre-sales support; and
• High level presentation experience.

Knowledge

• A solid understanding of the IT/ engineering/ telecoms industry
• A basic understanding of IoT
• In depth knowledge of the range of corporate business partners;
• In depth understanding of technology and services;
• In depth knowledge of relevant technologies (focus on IP);
• Operational management experience;
• Internal policies and procedures;
• Project management methodology;
• Business planning and Business Processes and Policies; and
• Comprehensive understanding of ICT trends and technologies.