Head of Product at Living Goods

Job Description

About the Role

The Head of Product owns the product strategy and roadmap for everything Living Goods builds digitally, working to the Chief Technology and Product Officer, who holds ultimate accountability for the digital portfolio. The Head is the senior leader responsible for building product management as a discipline and for the organisation’s ability to apply AI well into technology products. The role also works closely with the Innovations Team to identify opportunities, co-develop innovative solutions, translate emerging ideas and technologies into product opportunities, and ensure that innovation initiatives are aligned with the overall product strategy and roadmap.

Living Goods has run a digital portfolio without an established product management function, so the post-holder builds that function and the culture around it from the ground up. The role is hands-on: writing, reviewing and coaching product work directly, sitting with community health workers and supervisors in the field, and deciding on evidence whether to continue, adapt or stop

Reporting Scope

• The role reports to the Chief Technology and Product Officer, who holds ultimate accountability for the digital portfolio, and works as a peer to the Director, Software Engineering and collaborate with the Head of Innovations. The role line manages the Product team, and directs the applied AI capability. It is responsible for product management practice, discovery and evidence, applied AI capability, and product analytics with Performance, Evidence and Insights, and owns the product strategy, the roadmap and the AI features sequenced on it, within the technology direction and standards the Chief Technology and Product Officer sets. Technology strategy, architecture, the data platform and engineering standards sit with the Chief Technology and Product Officer and the Director, Software Engineering.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy, Roadmap and Evidence    35% of time

• Set and own the product strategy in line with our Program and Innovation strategy: what the products are for, who they serve, what they should do three years from now, and where AI earns its place.
• Own a single roadmap across the active software build lines, with AI features sequenced on it alongside everything else, and decide how it is ordered.
• Define the objectives and key results for the product function and for each product, and review performance against them.
• Lead discovery with community health workers, supervisors, programme staff and government partners, and bring evidence to decisions honestly, including recommendations to stop.
• Design for real constraints and for government ownership: intermittent connectivity, low-end devices, variable literacy, and a recurring cost a ministry can carry.

AI Capability and Practice    30% of time

• Lead the transformation to a truly AI-native engineering organisation, set the strategy and roadmap to move the department up its AI-maturity curve. This is a multi-stage journey and we are still early; part of the job is bringing the whole team up, including those who haven’t yet reached today’s baseline, and then getting to the next level and the one after.
• Lead from the front –  stay genuinely hands-on. Pair with engineers and set the standard for AI-assisted development: agentic workflows, skills, memory, and the day-to-day craft. You are the head of engineering people look up to, not a project manager.
• Turn functions into leverage — reshape roles like QA and product design away from per-team, per-task work toward “factory” capabilities: building the agents and systems that test and design at scale. Build the machine that tests the products, don’t test them by hand.
• Manage the human side of the change — take engineers through a fundamental shift in how they work, address the real fears that come with it, and turn the transition into something the team is energised by.
• Deliver — ship against programme and product commitments with a lean, high-leverage team, and keep quality high as more of the work moves through an agentic toolchain.

Building Product Culture    15% of time

• Define what good product management looks like at Living Goods and make it visible: problem statements, outcome measures, written decisions and honest post-release review.
• Establish the operating rhythm of the function, covering intake, refinement, release planning and outcome review.
• Shift the default question from what should we build to what problem are we solving and how will we know it worked.
• Accelerate experimentation and hypothesis-based learning: frame work as testable hypotheses, design the cheapest test that could disprove one, and treat a disproved hypothesis as a good outcome.
• Make the case for product management across programmes, engineering and country teams, and make it safe to stop things on evidence.

Coaching and Capability Development    10% of time

• Line manage, coach and develop the product management team, with clear expectations and regular, specific feedback.
• Build a structured development path for the team, covering core product skills: user research, written communication, stakeholder management and commercial judgement.
• Support colleagues moving into product from other disciplines with proper onboarding and a real transition plan, not just a change of title.
• Recruit consistently against a clear bar, and build succession so the function doesn’t depend on any one person.

Stakeholder and Partner Engagement    10% of time

• Input accurate technical content for donor proposals and reports.
• The Person We are Looking For
• We are looking for a product leader who has built a product function from nothing, who coaches by instinct, and who has real AI depth. The role suits someone who measures success by what the team can do without them, who is comfortable running discovery in a village and arguing a model choice with engineers, and who is honest about limitations, because overclaiming is fatal with an evidence-literate audience.

What the Role Requires

Essential

• 10 or more years in product management, including 3 or more years leading, coaching and developing product managers.
• Experience establishing product management where it did not previously exist, including the work of persuading colleagues to adopt it.
• AI features shipped into production, covering evaluation, quality control and human oversight, not proof of concept work alone.
• Judgement in choosing between models and providers on capability, latency, offline behaviour, data residency, cost and exit options.
• Ownership of several products at different lifecycle stages, with evidence of having stopped or changed direction on the basis of data.
• Strong discovery practice with users in low-connectivity, low-literacy or resource-constrained settings.
• Excellent written communication. The post-holder must make the case for product management in writing to sceptical audiences, so this is near-disqualifying if weak.

Desirable

• Experience in digital health, community health systems or international development.
• Experience of building for or handing over to government systems.
• Experience of open-source health platforms such as CHT, OpenSRP or CommCare.