Product Manager_K8 Trader/IQ Retail at Kerridge Commercial Systems South Africa

Key Responsibilities
Product Management

• Engage with Portfolio Director and senior leaders to define the product scope and strategic direction
• Interpret market needs, competitor product information, customer requirements and business input to structure and guide product scope and priority decisions
• Manage, refine, prioritise and communicate the product roadmap determined by a business case lead approach to ensure it is in line with overall product strategy and sustainable business growth
• Actively take decisions on a daily basis to re-align priorities and focus the team on the right objectives
• Actively collaborate with regional MD’s to ensure successful product scope requirements for regional GTM
• Be the go to product contact for the business and lead business case and use case workshops with customers and stakeholders to ensure critical information is captured to drive commercial success

Requirement Analysis

• Elicit high level customer and stakeholders problem and value statements and work with Solution Design to flesh out and break down requirements into manageable components
• Effectively balance both customer specific and strategic initiatives in the roadmap and provide clear visibility on roadmap priorities with supporting business cases or analysis
• Brief architects and technical leads on what is expected and help facilitate the discussion to define technical solution options and associated costs for delivering solutions aligned with expectation

Release Management

• Work with the Delivery Lead / Head of Product Delivery to set the release cadence for the product
• Set and communicate release goals for the Product Owners and Development Teams to ensure they understand the product vision and their part in its success

JIRA Management

• Track and follow backlogs, priorities and activities for the team in JIRA
• Ensure that features are decomposed to Epics and Stories are ready before these are planned into a release cycle
• Follow up and ensure that stories and epic statuses are updated with the correct and relevant status
• Define dashboards and tracking tools in JIRA and are able to give a status update on progress on request

Internal / External Customer Engagement

• Actively build and manage customer relationships by implementing best practice in customer and stakeholder engagements within the Project and Customer Success Manager
• Provide clear visibility on project related delivery milestones as well as product roadmap progress in by collating information from both Product and Project milestones
• Work alongside Delivery teams to ensure any delivery milestone risks are captured during the development lifecycle to allow transparent customer and stakeholder expectation setting

Experience & Knowledge
Key Requirements:

• Experienced in working with different senior level business, partner and customer stakeholders to solicit what they are trying to achieve and the commercial benefits any solution will bring to all parties
• Experienced in creating, maintaining, prioritising and communicating product roadmaps using product management tools (e.g. Aha!, productboard, Airfocus, Asana or monday.com)
• Experienced in working with and leading Agile delivery and business teams for business management software development companies (e.g. Scrum or Kanban)
• Experienced in leading, developing and coaching teams and senior stakeholders to build a collaborative self-organised enterprise and trust culture
• Expert knowledge of the Kerridge Commercial Services markets/customers and use cases in which our core products are present
• Experienced in budgeting processes with a focus on product profit and loss to justify investment business cases

Skills & Qualities

• The ability to clearly communicate product strategies and visions effectively to all levels of business, delivery and customer stakeholders
• The ability to build and maintain strong and trusted relationships with all levels of business, delivery and customer stakeholders
• The ability to present objectively with authority and confidence to senior levels of business, delivery and customer stakeholders
• The ability to act decisively and communicate the data driven rationale behind product strategy decisions
• The ability to adapt to change and successfully lead teams through any periods of change/disruption
• The ability to accurately prioritise, organise and plan their work and to seek continuous improvement to drive efficiencies in their product space
• Must have a pro-active, positive, open and collaborative approach to working with others in a team
• Must be open to learning new skills and self-development to drive both personal and team growth
• Must be comfortable in giving feedback at all levels with integrity as well as receiving it to build trust