M-Pesa Africa Product Owner- Payment Remittance

Kenya (Hybrid)

Job Description

We are Africa’s largest fintech providing financial services to more than 60 million customers and 5 million businesses, with transactions of over $1.2 billion a day across 8 countries. Driven by a strong passion in innovation, we provide Africa’s leading super app, the M-PESA Super App, pioneering a digital financial ecosystem that empowers customers and businesses to send and receive money and payments across the world, enables them with access to affordable credit and savings propositions, and provides them with best-in-class solutions to easily grow their wealth and businesses. United in our purpose to Transform Lives, we are determined and energetic in exploring and delivering solutions that consistently address our customers’ needs as we believe that we can only succeed if our customers and the community around us are succeeding.

The Product Owner (PO) at M-Pesa Africa plays a pivotal role in the product development lifecycle, acting as the bridge between the development teams and the business stakeholders. The PO is responsible for defining and prioritizing the product backlog, ensuring that the development team is working on stories that maximize business value and deliver necessary fixes and functionality to all customers. 

A key role within the ART, owning the product backlog for one of the Payments Services M-Pesa development squads working to a scaled agile framework (SAFe) model, performing all aspects of the Product Owner role in the context of a SAFe team. The portfolio that you will be supporting is the Payment Enablers portfolio for all markets with the specific focus on on E-commerce, cross border payments including card acquiring and issuing and Developer Eco System.

Responsibilities

• Owning the team backlog – maintaining and prioritizing in line with Product Management direction and earliest delivery of value to our customers 
• Taking content authority for the team backlog, ensures that quality of team’s documented user story and acceptance criteria follows agreed standards. 
• Representing the end user and works with SME’s to understand requirements, supporting the definition of features and co-creating user stories and other required artefacts 
• Working closely with the Product Management team to ensure features are well documented, and that business priority is understood and aligned with team activities
• Actively participating in team and program ceremonies, backlog refinement sessions, iteration planning activities • Leading the systems demo after each iteration • Performing preparation activities for program increment planning, helps drive PI objectives at team level 
• Providing continuous feedback on development, and provides story acceptance in accordance with agreed acceptance criteria and ‘definition of done’ 
• Understanding the core technology platform capability and collaborate with developers in the best way to meet product objectives, acts as the customer for developer questions 
• Working with System Architect to prioritize enablers

Qualifications

• Strong understanding of digital services, smartphone app development and digital design practices 
• Experience of software development lifecycle is essential, especially within agile methodologies (e.g Scrum, SAFe) 
• Experienced in leading agile feature teams to deliver both new and continuous improvements to customers 
• Experienced in the use of modelling tools (JIRA, Confluence). 
• Strong process and analytical skills, able to identify solutions to complex problems.
• Strong business and customer focus, and an appreciation of customer led design and user experience techniques 
• Ability to work proactively within a demanding environment, being a key contributor to a fast-moving product development process 
• Able to communicate and influence with tact and diplomacy. 
• Able to understand and explain complex technical concepts to business stakeholders 
• Demonstrable numerical, analytical and verbal skills, in particular well-developed written and verbal communication skills in English.
• Experience working within a multi-national team and serving customers from multiple countries would be of benefit. 
• Ideally educated to degree level, or equivalent