Product Manager

Job Title : Product Manager Location : Dubai Job Summary : Product strategy and roadmap • Own the product roadmap from Season 1 MVP to Season 2 scaled platform — prioritising what gets built in what order based on operational evidence, not assumptions • Define the build sequence for core modules • Make explicit trade-off decisions: what stays manual vs what gets automated, what gets built vs what gets integrated (e.g. mobile money APIs, third-party NDVI tools) • Maintain a living product brief that founders and engineers can use as a single source of truth — updated after every field observation, not once a quarter Field operations and discovery • Spend time on the ground during Pilot — observing where the manual process breaks and where it does not • Conduct structured discovery with farmers, fi eld liaisons, union leaders, and input suppliers to understand actual user behaviour vs assumed behaviour • Document every workaround, improvisation, and failure mode in the manual process — this is the product spec for Season 2 • Validate that onboarding flows work on feature phones before a single farmer is registered — not after Technical coordination • Work directly with the Technical Lead to scope, specify, and prioritise the engineering build for Season 2 • Write product requirements that are specific enough to build from — not vague feature descriptions • Own acceptance criteria: nothing ships without field-tested validation that it works on the devices and connectivity conditions farmers actually have • Manage the integration architecture Lender and partner product experience • Own the lender-facing product: the real-time portfolio dashboard used to monitor the loan book — the single most important feature for lender trust and retention • Work with the client onboarding and process flow Data and risk model • Develop the data models • Work with the founder to formalise the models and adopt ML and AI • Manage the monitoring product Required Experience and Qualifications Essential • 3+ years of product management experience — at least 2 years in a startup or early-stage environment where the product did not yet exist in its final form • Demonstrable experience building digital products for low-connectivity environments — USSD, WhatsApp, feature phone interfaces, or offline-first mobile applications • Experience working directly with end users in the field — not just with analytics dashboards; you must have sat with the people who will use what you build • Strong data literacy: comfortable with spreadsheets, SQL basics, and the ability to interrogate a dataset to validate a product assumption without needing a data analyst • Arabic fluency — spoken and written — is preferred - and the cultural literacy to work effectively with farming communities, union leaders, and rural agro dealers • English proficiency sufficient for lender, investor, and insurance partner communications • Based in or willing to relocate to Sudan for Pilot Strongly preferred • Experience in agricultural technology, agricultural finance, or development finance in Sub-Saharan Africa or MENA • Familiarity with agtech platforms • Working knowledge of agricultural systems or out-grower programs • Experience integrating financial APIs • Familiarity with remote sensing or GIS tools — even at a basic level • Experience working with or understanding of Islamic finance institutions Education • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Agricultural Science, Finance, Business, or a related field • Advanced degree or relevant professional qualification is advantageous but not required if the experience is demonstrably strong Show more Show less